Read on Twitter
Having worked at BlackBerry in its heyday (early 2000s), I see a lot of parallels to what Zoom is going through. Of course, that story did not have a happy ending, so I wanted to share a few thoughts 
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="👇" title="Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten" aria-label="Emoji: Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten">https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="👇" title="Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten" aria-label="Emoji: Rückhand Zeigefinger nach unten">
As Zoom-ing into a video meeting or a classroom is today, so too was pulling out your BlackBerry to fire off an email or check your stocks, circa 2002.
But then Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, Google launched Android, and all of the chinks in the @BlackBerry armor started coming undone, one by one. How can @zoom_us avoid the same fate?
My biggest learning from being at BlackBerry and @Android during these times was that product experience >>> security / tech advantage / what CIOs want / brand / install base etc. (esp. if the network effects are weak). If there is serious market pull, the rest gets figured out.
BlackBerry missed 3 key paradigm shifts that were critical to the product experience: the touchscreen, the developer ecosystem (which BlackBerry severely underinvested in), and the consumerization of IT.
Thankfully, I had the opportunity to learn from our mistakes when I became one of the first Product Managers on the Android team, tasked with growing mkt share. We were not shy about switching form factors, UI design etc if we felt that the consumer preferences were shifting.
It worked: today, Android is used by over 2 billion people around the world, and controls 86% of the global market… far, far greater than the 85 million users BlackBerry had at its peak.
So will Zoom be more like Blackberry or Android? If it wants to avoid the former fate, I& #39;d give three pieces of advice.
1- focus on building the best human-to-human virtual interaction experience. Only a small subset of human interactions are work meetings. Don& #39;t get bogged down in being a platform for business meetings. What got you here won& #39;t be enough in the future. Complacency kills!
2- Zoom should invest heavily in the developer ecosystem, and encourage user adoption of these apps. The dev ecosystem is the only obvious network effect for Zoom; # of VC-backed businesses built on top of Zoom should be considered a key performance indicator for the company.
3- leverage your market cap and unfair advantage: Sooner rather than later, there will be startups that build a better user experience than Zoom. Instead of trying to compete with them, acquire them. (Pull a Zuck and acquire the next Instagram)
Ultimately, the question for Zoom is whether it can innovate fast enough to evolve with the times. Given the consumerization of IT, products like Zoom have to be more than just the best B2B product on market: they need to be the best products for their use case, period.
Question for Zoom is whether it can innovate fast enough to be *that* product. BlackBerry went from relative obscurity to a global phenomenon to a relic in the same decade. Consumer preferences can shift seemingly overnight. Don& #39;t get caught sleeping at the wheel.
Read more of my thoughts here: https://medium.com/afore/will-zoom-be-the-next-android-or-the-next-blackberry-660452831dfe?sk=ab8cb6c70aa47b3efecf5070236713da">https://medium.com/afore/wil...
