Much like Elrond, I will give you a rough idea of how old I am by saying, “I was there when…”
I was there when Fonzie jumped the shark.
As a small child, I remember our ritual gathering around the television set when Happy Days was on TV. I have similarly vague memories of slightly burned stovetop popcorn, hockey games, and episodes of Three’s Company.
Today, we are going to talk about shark-jumping in software development. Oddly enough, this is not a conversation about Jira.
This is a conversation about Zoom.
I know many of you are going back to wearing fancy dress shirts and khaki pants and making “herp derp return to office herp derp” noises these days or honking like a loud, obnoxious goose going, “Hybrid! Hybrid! Hybrid!” Some of us look at you in the rearview mirror with a mixture of pity and… okay, well, lots of pity. I enjoy my “remote work is best work” t-shirt that matches my coffee mug. I am also not wearing any pants.
There is a certain inevitability to remote work that has gradually improved through better and better technologies to enable communication and interaction.
Currently, Zoom Meetings (apparently Zoom Workplace, as the application declares itself) is one of the shining jewels of “Hey, let’s have a remote meeting together!” Perhaps its meteoric rise is tied to the sudden pandemic, or it did so many things better than Google Meet or Microsoft Teams. For whatever reason, Zoom has risen to the top.
It no longer deserves to be there. Almost weekly, something changes inside Zoom to make it a less great product than the day before.
So what is happening here?
I frequently make a joke about how Apple is trying to be Samsung almost as hard as Samsung is trying to be Apple. In much the same way, Zoom is not doubling down on what makes it great as a market-leading product; they are trying to become something it is not and pushing toward second place.
Whatever “Zoom Workplace” thinks it is, it is not just the best place to hold virtual meetings. It has bolted a pile of features onto itself Frankenstein-style.
A score of UX changes to the product over time have confused me, from the hexagon-shaped exit button that replaces the “leave meeting” door if you are the meeting owner to the sudden increase of random popup dialogs at the top of the window. Most recently, each meeting I have entered includes a button labeled “Not hearing anything? Turn Up Volume.” Is this the most common tech support problem that Zoom users have?
If you regularly record meetings, the button location on the “you are sharing screen ribbon” changes repeatedly, from one of the most important buttons to something buried beneath the fold.
When sharing screens, you must mouse over an area at the top of your screen to pull down the ribbon that was previously at the bottom of the Zoom window, only to find that it does not mirror the ribbon in size and button layout.
Everything that has happened to Zoom in the past eighteen months has not made it better software for holding remote meetings for me.
Even more shocking is that it lags behind Google Meet in interesting features I have sometimes needed for a meeting!
I find it horrifying and fascinating at the same time when marketplace leaders do this to themselves. There is some kind of twisted incentive somewhere that drives product managers and company leadership to make changes to their software just for the sake of making changes.
You could argue that they have lost their way, as evidenced by their desire to have people back in the office.
Whatever they are doing is not suitable for their core business. I have no interest in wiring them up to my calendar, which leads Zoom to tell me, “No meetings scheduled. Enjoy your day!” First, I have plenty of meetings scheduled, and second, why is that a necessity for me to enjoy my day?
I just don’t understand what they are doing. This implies that they don’t know what they are doing either.
I hold at least my monthly staff meeting in Microsoft Teams as a polite reminder to wait for the day Zoom sinks so low that this will be an obviously better experience.
That day is still pretty far away, but every time I see new pixels inside Zoom, it feels like it is getting closer.
I am not sure what else to say.
If you manage a successful product like Zoom, you should ensure your changes to the product make it a better product.
See you next week!
