Christ they're dumb. Here is a golden opportunity to protect your business and build great PR.
As everyone else is pushing people back to the office, be the champion we're all looking for, run the studies, offer incentives, anything to prove that working remotely is a viable alternative in a modern world.
Then, expand the use cases, it's not just WFH, but working on-site (for companies with manufacturing in different locations), working on the move for managers, emergency preparedness, and, of course, webinar/training.
"Quite often, you come up with great ideas, but when we are all on Zoom, it's really hard," Yuan said, according to Insider. "We cannot have a great conversation. We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call."
We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call
Jesus Christ the idiot hasn't even identified the actual problem with his product. Namely being that everyone talks over each with no dynamic volume scaling.
People have made better products by themselves in an afternoon.
Well, maybe they should take a page from the open source book and use text as a medium more often.
If you want collaboration, use a chat room software with sub threads, like Slack. If you want announcements, email works, or a common chat room. If you want to present something, use a video meeting.
So it sounds like the CEO doesn't know how remote work actually should work. Which means they need to do more of it so they can effectively market their product.
I don't think Zoom really has much of a moat surrounding it. Slack, Google, Microsoft, and others offer alternatives that are about as good or better (often for free if you use their chat offering). They sprang into popularity from nothing around 2018 due to being just a little more stable and reliable than the competition, and someone could take their place just as easily.
Translation from BBB (business buzzword bullshit) to English:
CEO wants to look out on his domain and see his minions hard a work in the cube farm. He loves coming to work (because he does not have punch a clock) and want warm bodies to lecture to.
What? Remote work is awesome. It can be highly productive and liberating. The CEO of Zoom comes across as the most confounding and paradoxical Luddite. I'm so confused.
Yeah, if I was a board member, I'd be asking for his resignation. Zoom's primary activity at this point is running studies to prove remote work is better. That's it, that's the business they're in.
Zoom was used pre pandemic by most big tech companies. It just so happened that the pandemic accelerated their success in the world outside the tech comps. However now I try to avoid them even more, already was a bad rep when they had no security so anyone else could join sessions.
I think this is increasingly typical of the C-suite types in most corporations. They are people whose primary credentials are having wealth, connections, and a business degree. They did not start the businesses they run and usually did not work in them previously. So they know almost nothing about the workings of their company, its products, or its market and are arrogant enough to think none of that matters.
CEOs used to earn at least some of their higher salaries by providing long-term strategy and making large scale decisions. Now they just follow advice from the next level down, push for greater short-term profits, and jump to another company when the consequences of their shortcuts and bad decisions start to become obvious to their stockholders. They are mercenaries who are given command of someone else's army and win battles by not caring how many soldiers they lose in the process.