Zooming Around the House

 

Zoooomm! I used that word to describe how my very young kitten raced around the house. Her legs were short and stubby, but they didn’t lack for speed nor agility. Approach her when she didn’t want you near, and zoooomm, she was running off. 

That was over 20 years ago. What a difference two decades makes. Zoom has taken on a whole new meaning in our everyday lives and given us a whole new vocabulary. Zoom became a verb and spawned words such as Zoomcast and Zoominar. 

I listened to a podcast sponsored by Washington Post Live about “The Future of Work” that featured Zoom’s COO, Aparna Bawa. She joked that people suddenly understood what the company did since their solution was now embedded into everyone’s daily life. On a more serious note, she explained how their explosive growth during 2020 was unplanned, and she lauded her fellow Zoomies for their speed and agility in coming together to meet these new demands as they grew from one million to 300 million daily meeting participants in three months. These employees, she reminded listeners, were also impacted by the pandemic, with the majority of them working from home and sharing the same concerns as Zoom meeting participants. 

Zoom has enjoyed success because of their focus on their customers – responding to their feedback as quickly and as appropriately as possible – and their focus on their employees – addressing their concerns, thereby addressing their customers’ concerns. The result is the company’s focus on delivering innovation and value. 

The second reason for their success is the nature of their technology, which Bawa described as a testament to the technology team. Zoom has a highly scalable, cloud-native architecture with a distributed backend infrastructure. Nineteen co-located data centers working along with public cloud storage allows them to leverage so they can increase capacity and meet demand. What a great example of human resources (Zoom employees) and technology working to serve the customer.

Zoom, like all organizations, is wondering what will be the impact in a post-pandemic world on their business model. Since it appears that remote work does not negatively impact productivity, hybrid models and flexibility are likely to be the norm. Does this mean there will be less demand for Zoom? Bawa acknowledges this may be the case, and if so, that they will, once again, adjust their business model.

This opens up new possibilities for Zoom. They are working on a smart-gallery model where people who are present for a meeting in a conference room will have their own video boxes, thereby allowing remote workers the same participating experience. Another development being explored is a noise-suppression feature to eliminate background noise. No more apologizing for sirens, garbage trucks, or barking dogs. I could name a few people who will welcome this change.

In the meantime, as you are Zooming around with your Zoommates (hey, another new word), consider the possibilities for positive change we can embrace when we get to the other side of the pandemic. We all have the opportunity to contribute to defining what the new normal will be.

Cornelia and Barbara