I continue to be astounded by the challenges, profound changes, and responses by firms during this pandemic. It’s early days, but as we’ll explore below, there is a strategic battle going on right now that can inform us all as we work out our response strategies.
I’m going to use something that’s become close to all of us doing virtual work, which is the communications tools like Zoom, Webex, and Teams, to draw out key strategic insights to answer questions that are facing all of us. Each of these tools had a unique journey and context that can provide parallels that will help us make stronger decisions. Specifically, the question is this:
When we are faced with a fresh change in context and architecture, do we build a new branch or can we incrementally build on the core?
Like many of you, I had moved much of my work to virtual tools prior to the outbreak of COVID, but since then we’ve seen two profound shifts in our work. First, is that virtual connection has moved from an augmentation of in-person activity to the primary means. Secondly, virtual tools have now become our primary resource for forming new relationships, as well.
These two shifts have raised the stakes radically for the platforms we use, and as you might guess, the competition is fierce, compelling, and taking place right in front of us.
Evolutions and Revolutions: Webex, Teams & Zoom
I chose these three for illustrating some strategic contrast. Please don’t infer preferences, for as we’ll see, the space is still very much in flux.
Collectively, these tools (and their close cousins) have become our primary way to connect and interact virtually. We are in the midst of a great experiment, which is whether we use the interaction models that augmented our face-to-face work as our primary tools. Can we count on them to enable us as humans to do the collaboration, connection and decision making that will allow us to build value for ourselves and our stakeholders?
To get at this, let’s set a bit of context.
Webex is the grandfather of the group, first brought to market in 1995, and becoming a public company in 2000. It was acquired by Cisco in 2007 and has evolved from there. It has a rich set of products and services, built from the insights of the firm’s core competencies in enterprise-class software.
Teams has a lineage that includes Skype (first released in 2003) and the much upgraded Skype for Business (released in 2015). Skype was the application that scaled international voice and rudimentary video to the world. The cloud-based Team’s original focus was as a with-in enterprise collaboration tool similar to Slack.
Zoom was started in 2011 by an ex-Cisco leader and 40 engineers targeted at video telephony and online chat. Zoom’s core strategy was to be easier to use than its competitors. It launched in 2013 and had the benefit of being built as a cloud-first, peer-to-peer platform. Zoom has developed their tech in plain sight, writing a blog to share the backroom details, which you can read here.
Lessons & Takeaways
#1: When a product was built matters
Webex was first built in the mid-’90s, and the core applications were PowerPoint and audio. Its user interface feels “enterprise-ish,” and while it’s on a solid enterprise platform, it can feel intimidating to fresh users. Making choices are usually a window or two into the stack and there can be several paths to complete a given task.
Insight: The core of the technology platform is driven by the original problem to be solved, the technology available to solve it, and is built to work within those constraints. In this case, VOIP progress was still relevant and video broadcast was nascent. Every subsequent feature decision is constrained and anchored by these initial conditions. For your world consider this: when was your main offering built, and most importantly, will it still address a relevant problem post-COVID.
#2: Architecture priority matters
Webex and Teams were built with the mindset that they would be on very high, enterprise quality connectivity (because of course users would be at their place of work!). Zoom had the insight that they needed to make a simple user interface and hide the connection complexity to have much better peer-to-peer performance even in the world of poor (think residential) connections. Their site states that they can maintain audio down to a 42 percent packet loss ratio.
Insight: Every well-designed product or service is driven by 3-5 underlying principles and priorities. There is never a product that can “do it all” or has no trade offs. Dating all the way back to the PIMS study, there is room in each market for a dominant player and at least two competitors.
So far, Zoom’s priority of simplicity and strong distributed connection robustness has citizens and entrepreneurs using it in droves. Corporate clients are partial to their enterprise choices and continue to view Zoom as an upstart. Again, for your world, what is the prioritized architecture that informs all the group’s decisions? What through line can your users expect to see?
#3: You can never be secure enough
The well-publicized Zoom bombing phenomena and discussion of global packet safety point to the fact that there is no singular platform that can be considered secure for all time.
Insight: Security has always been – and will continue to be – relative. Good architecture will make the effort to break into the data not worth the benefits received. Study after study reveals that the weakest link in the chain of security, and the path most often used to breach, remains human empathy and a willingness to help others. In Zoom’s case, the initial casual openness of meeting initiation was too low of a bar for the high-value discussions and audiences that were suddenly engaged during the COVID transition (most of this now appears on the mend – see note here). For you, how has the world changed since you and your team are working with the most sensitive data from their most informal locations? Are you secure enough?
Incorporating These Insights Into Your Work
Besides a fascinating, real-time set of strategies being played out in front of us, there are some deeper things here for us to consider.
We are all on the arc of strategic choices. In many cases, these choices have been made for us, while in other cases, we have chosen them for ourselves. In any case, we always have a choice to either stay on that path or create a new branch.
To get you started in thinking this through, here are some useful questions:
- What is the current core of your business value creation? When was it built? What problem did it solve? What were its key attributes and priorities?
- How has the user base shifted since the core was formed? What technologies have come to the mainstream since then?
- If you could “clean sheet” a solution for your freshest client base, what would that look like?
- Where do you have a “security” like ongoing battle underway on your current product or solution? How do you know you are keeping up?
Accelerating Your Progress
Getting a fresh perspective on your current markets, products and capabilities are table stakes to getting the full value from your team at this important time. If you’d like to get a big head start in developing a blueprint for your business recovery, consider reaching out.
I take on a limited number of advisory and project clients, using facilitation tools, checklists, and processes honed through dozens of assignments. (and they work great virtually :-)) If you’d like to talk about how an advisory or consultative approach could change your trajectory, please reach out to scott@scottpropp.com or put a 20-minute appointment on the books using this link.
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