Yesterday I participated in a 4hr virtual symposium called ‘Disruption 2020’ run by the MIT Sloan Management Review. If you are interested in disruptive innovation and strategic management, this was a brilliant session with experts including Scott Anthony (Innosight), Amy Webb (NYU Professor and Founder, Future Today Institute), and Rita Gunter McGrath (Professor, Columbia Business School).
They have an edition dedicated to it which you can see here.
The VC session was run on GoToWebinar, one of the traditional VC incumbent firms founded in 2004. Unfortunately, the technology didn’t work that well. If I had to rate the user experience of the technology on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being perfect, I would give it a 5.
Every speaker and host (there were 8 or so speakers and 2 hosts) had issues. One had to drop out then come back in. A few speakers could only speak as the VC wasn’t working. Some had constant cutting out or freezing throughout.
It is unclear why these issues were occurring, and who exactly is responsible. Whether it is GoToWebinar, internet bandwidth, home wifi, 4G, human error or something else, this shouldn’t be an issue in 2020. For me, this feels like what dial-up internet was in the early 2000s.
Clearly these are the fundamental CX issues which have enabled a young start-up (Zoom) to rapidly scale across B2B and B2C with a powerful value proposition focusing on the B2B SaaS Playbook: ease of use, integrations, free or flexible pricing, and better performance. I wrote a post recently on how impressed I was a few months ago in being able to easily host a global conference hosted by Seth Godin with many hundreds of people.
Whilst Zoom is facing other challenges right now (e.g. security, privacy etc), from what I have seen with competing vendors, it will be around for a long time to come (and the others, won’t be).
Andrew Essa 