Who's Zooming who?

Without doubt the story of last week had nothing to do with COVID-19, for once, but was about a Zoom call that went viral. By Friday evening, everyone had heard of Jackie Weaver, the heroic chief officer of the Cheshire Association of Local Councils, who had presided over a meeting of Handforth Parish Council and ended up thwarting an attempted coup d'état. 

The chaotic session - which took place in December - found itself onto social media last week, and before you knew it, was being replayed every hour on Sky News and the BBC's rolling news channel, and even found itself on the world stage via CNN. Sitcom writers burst forth to say that the Handforth meeting was more comical than anything they could have devised. Even Reece Sheersmith, who created The League of Gentlemen and its hilariously surreal depiction of life in the fictional northern town of Royston Vasey, and on which you could easily have thought the stroppy burghers of Handforth were based. But, by yesterday, more tales had emerged of similarly dysfunctional public assemblies taking place on Zoom, which struck me as significant - not the fact that local administration is chaotic or being conducted online, but the prominence of the meeting platform itself: Zoom. 

In less than a decade Zoom has gone from a typical Silicon Valley startup to the de facto generic noun for online meetings, supplanting Skype and Apple’s FaceTime in the process - and pretty much in just this last year. To the chagrin of Microsoft and its Teams application and Cisco’s WebEx, everything is now “a Zoom call”. I had never heard of the platform until a couple of years ago, when the PR agency I was working with at my last company recommended that we switch to it from the company-mandated WebEx. It wasn’t entirely clear what the USP was, but it seemed more reliable as well as less rigid for participants at multiple companies and their own unique IT environments.

Picture: Zoom

It is clear, though, that throughout the last year of lockdown that the company founded by former Cisco engineering executive Eric Yuan (pictured right) in 2011 has come into its own. So much so that easily the smartest career move I’ve ever seen is that of a former colleague who joined Zoom last April as a international marketeer, just as the company's usage was going nuclear. 

By last spring, everyone and everything seemed to be taking place via Zoom. Even the business of government during the COVID-19 crisis, when Boris Johnson - confined to quarters by his own bout of the virus - was seen to hold a crucial meeting, during which the Zoom meeting ID was clearly visible. This prompted inevitable questions about the platform's security: to some, it came as a surprise that Her Majesty’s Government was, effectively, using the same app as families doing quiz nights and birthday drinks. This wasn’t the only occurrence of concerns about Zoom’s privacy, with the emergence of ‘Zoombombing’, whereby it was discovered that nefarious scrotes could hack into a Zoom meeting and bother it with explicit images. This was on top of more innocent Zoombombs when barely clothed flatmates accidentally walked through kitchens, along with children bouncing into meetings and cats leaping in front of webcams.

There is no doubt that Zoom, more than any other video communications platform before, has played an unprecedented role in creating a new and strange normality over the last year, taking the place of restaurants, pubs, living rooms and kitchen dining tables in enabling some form of social life, as well as keeping the business meeting culture going. It has played host to school lessons, church services, stag parties and blind dates. Even Britain’s Houses of Parliament have adopted a Zoom-based technology to facilitate business in the Commons, enabling up to 120 MPs to join any particular session while only 50 are allowed to be physically present in the chamber due to social distancing measures. Italy’s biggest ever mafia trial - the mass prosecution of 355 Calabrian ’NDrangheta suspects - is currently being conducted in a special courtroom in Lamezia Terme, with defendants in jails dotted across the country facing their accusers via Zoom.

Thanks to Zoom and its rivals we have all, in the last year, spent more time in strangers’ houses than ever before. I joined my current company in April and have only ever spent time with my new colleagues via laptop's webcam. And, yet, I know what my colleagues’ kitchens look like, their bedrooms even and what books they read (or purport to read, given the craze of artfully arranging bookshelves to showcase one’s literary tastes). We’ve even succumbed to insecurities about what we look like on Zoom: working from home used to mean rolling out of bed and sitting at the kitchen table in pyjamas and the first T-shirt that came to hand, until people realised that a meeting on Zoom placed dress code under even greater scrutiny than if you were actually in the office. 

This has led to fashion and beauty magazines running vacuous features about the perils of spending so much time on video calls. Ofcom has estimated that since the pandemic began we're spending 40% of our working weeks in online meetings. ‘Zoom face’ is, apparently, a thing, that we're now hyper-conscious of how we look down the barrel of a webcam, and that having it look up your nostrils and displaying the contents at the other end on a high-definition stream may not be the most attractive thing in the world. Scientists working for Unilever has even claimed that the blue light emitted by laptop screens is putting us at UV risk, and that five working days a week spent on video calls has the same impact on our skin as as 25 unprotected minutes in the midday sun. There are, too, more physical debilitations from the constant round of video conferences that now, as spines grow weary from being hunched over laptops on home furniture that wasn’t designed for nine-hour working days, and eyes that have become sore and tired from LED screens.

Our pain is Zoom’s gain. As the pandemic took hold last spring, daily downloads of the app increased by 30-times, year-on-year. Zoom became the United States’ most downloaded iPhone app for much of 2020. Recent figures put daily usage at some 350 million - up from just 10 million at Christmas 2019. Every financial quarter since the coronavirus emerged, the company has seen its quarterly revenue grow by enormous orders of magnitude as much, at one point, as 355% in a year. The explosion in use even appeared to catch the San Jose, California-based company by surprise, with its international head of partner marketing, Derek Pando, telling advertising industry magazine The Drum that it was, early on, like being in “a war room”. “We didn't know where it was going next and we didn't know how bad it was going to be. We were constantly trying to shift our resources to try to support people that were using and relying on Zoom,” he said.

The big shift for Zoom was its breakout from being just a rival to business communications apps like Webex and Skype. Until COVID-19 hit, most Zoom users were businesses and, even if home users had experience of using Zoom at work, it meant learning-as-you-go for families. Grannies, aunts, uncles and teenagers alike all had to quickly learn Zoom etiquette and dealing with Internet latency and not all talking at once. Everyone become their own television director, learning the simple art of framing to avoid the alarming sight of someone’s enormous, looming forehead. There was also the lesson - sometimes learned painfully - of knowing when to have the microphone on and when to have it off, not just to preserve bandwidth, but also to save fellow participants from the sound effects human bodies generate of their own volition.

Zoom has arguably been the technology success story of the pandemic. But as vaccine programmes start to take effect, questions are inevitably being raised as to how it will fare when things return to some form of normality (it's share price even took a hit when the Pfizer jab was announced in November). The company is hopeful that remote working will remain in place, continuing to prove a boon to corporate use. Certainly at this stage it’s still unclear just how and when business life will return to in-office working - even if it ever will. Office workers will, I’m sure, be eager to get back to their previous routines, even the arduous urban commutes. along with the social aspects of being in the same workspace as others. What’s not known, however, is just what measures companies will have to put in place, all the while COVID-19 is still out there, and 100% vaccination has not been achieved. One likelihood is that a hybrid model will be adopted. Home life, on the other hand, will be different. Hardly anyone you or I know is exactly happy about being barred from seeing loved ones and friends in the flesh, but with the virus showing signs of being countered by vaccines and lockdowns, and with the days already starting to grow longer, you get the sense that it won’t be long before we can step out from behind the webcam and see people in the flesh, even touch them.

Realistically, the biggest threat to Zoom’s future will be from the companies that it managed to eclipse in a record space of time. Microsoft, Cisco, Google and even Facebook have not stood still when it comes innovating their own video platforms, and will not have been best pleased by the ten-year-old upstart stealing their thunder. Microsoft, in particular, stands to benefit more than others, given the ubiquity of its Office software and packages like Word and Powerpoint, and the corporate licences that companies buy to provide employees with the complete suite, which also includes Teams. All of Zoom's rivals have added new features, such as background noise cancellation to make working from a crowded home that much less perilous. Teams even added ’Together Mode’, designed to give multiple users the sense of all sitting in the same environment, though in reality it makes a group of colleagues look more like participants in the opening title sequence of The Muppet Show. Time will tell, then, whether the innovation arms race in video conferencing will continue to be as vital, as the world gets back to normal. 

Other workplace collaboration tools with video calling, like Slack (which has just been acquired by Salesforce) are also gaining ground, and its likely that all the players in this market will have also reached peak usage over the last year, limiting further growth. Zoom will have heard these arguments before, and will argue that it already successfully penetrated a crowded market when it launched in 2011. It’s just that the coronavirus has given it an unprecedented bump.

Picture: Zoom

We may - thankfully - be soon seeing the back of quiz nights and laptop dinner parties, but in the business world there’s enough uncertainty about future working practices that it’s fair to say that Zoom and its rivals are here to stay. And until computing intelligence develops to such an advanced degree that software will be able to detect when a call participant is about to speak, we will still be hearing the words “You’re on mute!” for a long time to come.

You're on mute!

It was during yesterday's 10 Downing Street coronavirus press conference that I was suddenly restored to the corporate life I left behind a few months ago. If you've been watching these 'pressers', as they're known in the trade, you'll have seen them alter in a matter of days. At first there would be a No.10 stateroom packed with the nation's political editors (Kuenssberg, Peston, Rigby, et al) throwing questions at the prime minister, the UK's chief medical officer and its chief science officer, each standing side-by-side like The Three Amigos. Now, it's a sparse chamber, with the spokespeople du jour spaced the requisite two metres apart, fielding questions via video from journalists bunkered in their home offices and no doubt hoping that an errant child doesn't suddenly burst in.

Yesterday's update from Chancellor Rishi Sunak and deputy CMO Jennie Harries took me back to almost every corporate conference call I've ever been on: the Daily Telegraph's political correspondent commenced her question without unmuting her microphone, prompting Sunak to utter the immortal words of every virtual meeting host: "I think you're on mute." ITV's ever-languid Robert Peston went further by not fully hearing Sunak's invitation to speak, responding with "Oh shit! Er...hello...". We've all done it. Watch any amount of television now and news programming has now become a replica of corporate life. News studios are now virtually empty as anchors conduct interviews via FaceTime or Skype. No wonder those working in the TV industry are fearing for their long term futures as viewers grow used to the sight and sound of talking heads coming through laptop, tablet and smartphone cameras, just as simply as they did when sat across the studio set. Broadcasters have too much professional pride to consider this to be the future, however. TV in the HD era relies on sharp images and that can only be achieved in a studio with state-of-the-art imaging technology and participants appearing on camera properly lit and made up for the medium.

The rapid conversion to video conferencing to keep a nation in lockdown informed and entertained has, though, been interesting. Sky News even went as far the other day as running a Q&A segment on coronavirus maternity health in which all three participants - presenter Sarah-Jane Mee, who is 26 weeks pregnant, Dr. Zoe Williams and Sharon Gamon of Private Midwives - appeared from home via laptops. As crude and as sometimes unpredictable as it can be when home bandwidth wobbles, it was remarkably effective. I just know how trepidatious it must be for producers normally used to rock-solid studio connections who don't have to deal with the vagaries of network coverage.

This week, for the first time, millions of people in Britain will be trying out video conferencing for the first time. For some, it will be an amusing novelty as the family gathers virtually on a Houseparty screen or socially distanced by Zoom's 'gallery mode', which turns the session into The Brady Bunch title sequence. For those of us used to corporate meetings over Webex, Skype or Microsoft Teams, it'll be second nature. In my last company, where the HQ team was often spread over substantial distances of the San Francisco Bay Area by flexible working arrangements, it was simply the norm for some to be in the office with others in their kitchens or wherever they did their work from home.

But, whether for carrying on with work or simply having a family gathering, virtual meetings do require etiquette. The biggest bugbear I've experienced on business calls is people forgetting that they're not in the same room. Even with galleried platforms like Zoom it's important for everyone to remain in vision so that you know when a current speaker has stopped, and you can interject without crashing the latency that sometimes makes these systems cacophonous. That also requires everyone to remember that you're dealing with home broadband connections and, usually, WiFi, which can be compromised by a fellow dweller zapping a jacket potato in the microwave, or a child killing the boredom by playing Fortnite online. I have been on conference calls where reception quality for some participants has meant everyone saying "over" after they've said their piece. I'm not kidding.

There are simple rules for making video conferencing both effective and not the weird experience it might seem at first. The first is to make sure your equipment is properly set-up. With many business users now finding that their working day, which would otherwise be a mixture of formal and informal meetings and encounters, is now one conference call after another, time efficiency is vital. Nothing truncates an hour-long slot more than connections dropping or speakers cutting out because they weren't tested to begin with. This is especially important with video conferencing, so check that your camera and microphones are working properly. Next, have a planned agenda. Even if you're just 'huddling' with your team to feel the love, you're not in the coffee area hanging out. Time - especially now - is money. As nice as it will be to share experiences of your own life at home under lockdown, keep the social chit-chat to a minimum, so that you can focus, in the limited window you have available, on the priorities to update everyone on. Save the cat news for Facebook.

The other key point of etiquette is to stay in the call. Unless you're in a listen-only 'virtual town hall meeting', there should be no sneaking out to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, or even worse, to the toilet for a pee. This is especially important if you're wearing Airpods and remain connected throughout. Be reassured, I do not speak from personal experience here, but we recently saw Dale Ross, the mayor of Georgetown in Texas, briefly leave a city council meeting for a 'bathroom break' with his microphone still switched on. This doesn't just happen to Frank Drebin. That said, wherever you do your video calls, choose somewhere quiet. Even with laptop or smartphone microphones these days being highly sophisticated, unless you're in a home studio, with sound baffles and a broadcast-grade microphone, background noise will still disrupt the audio. That means not opening the window if you live under a Heathrow flightpath, as I do, or on a busy road...when roads are busier again, of course. The best way to ensure a video conference call runs smoothly is for studious use of the mute button, so that bandwidth is optimised, but as the Telegraph reporter found yesterday, you've got to stay on top of things so that when it's your turn to speak, your fellow conferencers aren't resorting to lip reading.

For the corporate world, ever conscious of social responsibility (as well as dividend-minded shareholders), the COVID-19 lockdown will be disruptive, for sure, but the absence of business travel will be exactly the sort of thing chief financial officers will lap up. Discretionary travel is normally the first casualty of financial cutbacks, and when you add CSR commitments, companies have been imposing travel bans long before the current crisis reared its ugly head. According to the Global Business Travel Association, the coronavirus is expected to impact the business travel sector by $820 billion as corporate travel is pared right back, especially in Asia where at least three out of every four companies have cancelled or suspended all or most travel to China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and other countries in the continent. Environmentalists will no doubt be rejoicing, too. I spent most of my time in my last company travelling, and I can attest that it really isn't the glamourous life it might seem. Yes, it's nice to have a meeting over lunch in Paris, but not much fun being sealed into an air-conditioned conference room in Dubai for a meeting you could have just as efficiently conducted via Zoom and without a tedious seven-hour flight and all the time zone carnage it causes. When we all return to normal, I wonder whether business travel will ever be the same again.