Zoom

Zoom has experienced massive commercial success. Courses taught at NYU Tandon were taught completely online for a few years. Statistics provided by Zoom are shown in the figures below. There is a very clear jump from 2019 to 2020 in Zoom meeting participants. Zoom's participants jumped from 10 million to 200 million and making its way to a peak of 350 million by December 2020. Zoom's success from be clearly seen visually in Zoom's revenue graph where there is a massive jump at the start of 2020.

Will Zoom continue to experience commercial success well into the future or will it find itself relegated as a short piece of history in the long history of Video Conferencing and Video Telecommunications Technology? Video Telecommunications has been widely supported as a Software Application. Webex was founded in 1995 and is a Video Conferencing Company from the Dot-Com Era. Skype is a chatting application that supports Video Telecommunication and it was founded in 2003. Discord, another chatting application, was founded in 2015 and supports Video Telecommunication. FaceTime, an application for the Apple Ecosystem of iPhones, Macs and iPads has been around since 2010. Google supports Video Conferencing with Google Meets and Google Hangouts. Microsoft Teams has a Video Conferencing Feature. Its clear that Zoom was not the first Video Conferencing Software Application. It's also clear that Video Conferencing is not unique to Zoom and that Video Telecommunications is widely supported amongst diverse software applications and is even supported by large Social Media Platforms like Meta.

But even with virtually free access to Video Telecommunications software, Consumers, Academic instutitions and Corporations did not use Video Telecommunications nor did they incorporate it into their lives or organizational workflows. It is only in the context of a Global Pandemic of Covid-19, that the application of Video Telecommunications, a technology that has been around for a long time, found itself being used in a professional manner and for pedagogy. Video Conferencing has actually experienced widespread adoption and use, but what will happen in a post-pandemic world? Once all the lockdowns come to an end, and all the mask mandates cease. The fears of Covid inevitably diminish over time and Covid will slowly join the long list of respiratory diseases that can cause colds. Covid may be considered a more severe virus but it will just be another respiratory virus of many that people have always been catching, dealing with and treating. What happens to Video Conferencing in a world where the fears of Covid are a distant memory?

We may find that we will live in a hybrid world. The vast majority of office employers plan to use a hybrid work model.¹ This may give employees and employers extra flexibility in their workflows and personal lives. Perhaps we may find that we still much prefer in person communication when people have to make important decisions and important discussiions. Video Conferencing and Digital Technologies may never recreate how communicating in person feels but people may find Video Conferencing very useful for more routine and mundane tasks.

We may find that Digital Technology has progressed so much that Augmented, Mixed Reality, Virtual Reality Technologies will be widely used. We may all be using Microsoft's Hololens, Meta's Oculus or perhaps AR glasses will be the new electronic of the 2020s and will shake up the mobile technology industry like the iPhone did in 2007. 

Perhaps we may find that we still much prefer face to face communication. We may find that dealing with technology while trying to communicate is incredibly frustrating. That just like Video Conferencing technology of the past via the Picturephone, people will reject it for one reason or another. Neither retail consumers and enterprise customers wanted to adopt the PicturePhone. This outcome will prove Noll's finding that Technology does not drive Society but rather is secondary to consumer demand. 

^{1 Baker, Mary. “Gartner Survey Reveals 82% of Company Leaders Plan to Allow Employees to Work Remotely Some of the Time.” Gartner, Gartner, 14 July 2020, https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2020-07-14-gartner-survey-reveals-82-percent-of-company-leaders-plan-to-allow-employees-to-work-remotely-some-of-the-time.}