Any company that gets big enough and accumulates enough users always ends up wanting to build its own ecosystem. It’s understandable, because having everything connected to users in a way that is cohesive is desirable and let’s be honest – it’s just a natural progression for a company’s growth, I think. The last corporation to do so was Zoom, whose app now has more than 500 million installations on the Google Play Store alone. His vision for the future is to have his own little bubble where his users can exist, creating an email, calendar and possibly a messaging app just for them.
I can see it now – telling someone that my email address is [email protected] looks and even looks funny (it will certainly look funny), but it may well be something soon. According to The Information, the company has already started the development of a webmail client and is in internal negotiations to build a branded calendar web application to complement it. They want these projects to implement “next generation” features, although details are missing.
Regarding messages, they may or may not create a standalone application. Instead, they can only improve Zoom’s chat functionality. We may see something outside the company as early as the new year or at least sometime in the first quarter of 2021, but we will keep you posted. While Zoom’s goal is to target companies rather than individual consumers, there is no doubt that everything they develop can eventually reach us, normal people.
Although I don’t really use Zoom a lot, I can’t help but agree that this is a good thing. More competition in the industry means that bigger companies like Google and Microsoft will stay on their toes and, hopefully, innovate more than in the past. It is easy to feel comfortable when you sit on the throne. Every castle needs a siege or two every now and then, don’t you agree?
Zoom stole a large part of the Internet spotlight during the pandemic, continuously implementing new features, such as unlimited 24-hour calling, support for smart screens, improvements (not to mention the security issues that they handled really well, actually!) You could switch to or at least create an email address @ zoom.com if it becomes a problem? Let us know in the comments!
