It’s possible that Zoom wants to grow its company beyond video calling. The Information claims that the company has spent a significant amount of the previous two years designing its own email and calendar clients.
The apps, internally referred to as Zmail and Zcal, might be introduced by Zoom during its Zoomtopia conference in November. There is no official statement or confirmation from Zoom as yet.
Do we really need yet new productivity suite, you may be asking yourself. The Information speculates that, from Zoom’s point of view, the corporation may consider the apps vital to its continued existence.
Zoom did exceedingly well during the Pandemic
Zoom appears to be doing better than the majority of pandemic darlings given that it recently reported a $1.1 billion quarterly sales. But underneath those figures, the business’s growth has slowed and its stock price has fallen.
It also finds itself in a scenario that many businesses that compete with Google and Microsoft have recently had to deal with. The fact that many companies combine Zoom with Workspace and Office 365 is a serious problem. These are all-inclusive packages that can meet the bulk of a business’s productivity requirements.
That’s not a favourable situation to be in in a market where corporations are continually striving to reduce costs.
However, given that Google and Microsoft have spent years perfecting Gmail and Outlook, respectively, and that those products now hold a monopoly on the market, it is difficult to see how email and calendar clients would help Zoom defeat its rivals.
‘THERE ARE A LOT OF NEW SERVICES IN THE PIPELINE’
Now, there’s nothing radical about the idea of selling videoconferencing as part of a larger suite of services. Indeed, that’s how all of Zoom’s principal competitors market their wares. In the case of Microsoft Teams—a rival to both Zoom and Slack—that suite is Microsoft 365. With Google Meet, it’s Google Workspace.
Many businesses already pay for one of these two productivity bundles, and might default to Teams or Meet over Zoom for that reason alone. That gives Zoom a powerful incentive to make clear that it isn’t a single-product company.
