Any company that gets big enough and amasses enough users always ends up wanting to build their own ecosystem. It’s understandable, because having everything tie in for users in a way that’s cohesive is desirable, and let’s be honest – it’s just a natural progression of a company’s growth, I think. The latest corporation to do so is Zoom, who’s app now has over 500 million installs on the Google Play Store alone. Their vision for the future is to have their own little bubble where their users can exist by building an email, calendar, and possibly a messaging app all for themselves.
I can see it now – telling someone that my address to receive an email from them is michael.perrigo@zoom.com sounds and even looks funny (their looks will certainly be funny), but it may very well be a thing before long. According to The Information, the company has already begun development on a webmail client and is in early talks internally to build a branded calendar web app to complement it. They want these projects to implement “next generation” features, though the details were absent.
Regarding messaging, they may or may not build a standalone app. Instead, they may just improve Zoom’s chat functionality. We could see something out of the company as early as the new year or at least at some point in Q1 of 2021, but we’ll keep you posted. While Zoom’s aim is to target companies as opposed to individual consumers, there’s no doubt that whatever they do develop may eventually trickle down to us regular folks.
Though I don’t really use Zoom that much, I can’t help but agree that this is a good thing. More competition in the industry means that larger companies like Google and Microsoft will remain on their toes and hopefully innovate more than they have in the past. It’s easy to get comfortable when you sit on the throne. Every castle needs a siege or two every now and then, wouldn’t you agree?
Zoom stole a massive chunk of the internet spotlight during the pandemic by continually implementing new features like unlimited 24-hour calls, smart display support, improvements (not to mention having security issues that they handled quite well, actually!) Would you switch over to, or at least create an @zoom.com email address if it became a thing? Let us know in the comments!
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