According to The Information, the company is preparing to launch email and calendar apps before the end of the year. It would turn Zoom, which has already evolved from a video chat platform to a competitor to Slack and whiteboard apps and even your office phone, into a full- fledged competitor to Microsoft Office.
It makes sense that the company would go after them if they got into other workAPPS. As the company's ambitions have grown, so has the company's desire to own more of the work community.
The use of calendar and email as scheduling tools means that it could be more integrated with companies that already use it. Both Microsoft and Google are trying to edge out the other by increasing the Meet button in their calendar applications.
People adopted it in droves because it was better at video than any of the suites. Both teams and meet are excellent products. With companies cutting spending, it may start to look like Zoom is unnecessary. It's a choice between getting even deeper into how businesses work or being cut out altogether. It knows what happened to Slack and is trying not to.
It is a choice between getting even deeper into how businesses work or being cut out completely.
It will need to be prepared for a long, expensive brawl if it wants to take on Teams and Meet as well as Office and Workspace. Even with its suite of wildly popular free tools like Gmail and Google Docs, the company has spent years toiling to steal enterprise market share away from Microsoft and is still only doing so in small chunks. Most companies can't afford to join the fight, so they don't carve out any real market share for themselves.
That doesn't mean that Zoom couldn't have new ideas in these places. Calendly, Daybridge, and Cron are some of the companies that have recently released calendar apps. They brought some new ideas into the email space last year, and Superhuman continues to be well-liked in tech circles, despite the fact that most users would argue email is in dire need of some innovative attention. It's hard to say if it's the right company to do it, but it would be the most out-there thing the company has done recently.
It raises the question, what does Zoom want to be? It looked like it was going to be the internet's underlying video infrastructure for a while. Thanks to web standards, great video is easy and cheap. If it has its way, Zoom will return to being a work tool, one that is used for more than video.
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