In a span of weeks in March 2020, an enormous portion of the global knowledge economy moved into video meetings. Companies that had been resistant to remote work for years suddenly had no choice. Schools moved entirely online. Family birthdays became Zoom birthdays. Doctor appointments became video calls.
Zoom went from a competent enterprise video conferencing product to a verb. It happened so quickly that most people did not notice the moment when it stopped being a brand and started being a generic action. Daily active users on the platform went from around ten million in December 2019 to over three hundred million by April 2020.
The infrastructure underneath was not ready for that scale of growth that quickly. There were outages. There were security problems, including the famous Zoombombing issue where uninvited participants could join open meetings and disrupt them. Zoom moved fast to address the security concerns, sometimes faster than some critics gave them credit for, but the issues highlighted how unprepared the entire video conferencing infrastructure was for the load it was suddenly carrying.
What was striking from a software perspective was how quickly people adapted to the new patterns. Within a few weeks, the conventions of video meetings had stabilised. Mute when not speaking. Raise your hand virtually before contributing. Turn the camera off when you needed a break. The norms emerged organically and globally, with surprisingly little variation across different industries or cultures.
The bigger story was about what this revealed about how work had actually been organised. A large amount of in-person meeting time turned out to be entirely replaceable with video calls, often more efficient because they were shorter and more focused. A non-trivial amount of in-person time turned out to be essential and impossible to replicate effectively online, especially the informal interactions that had been undervalued because they were treated as background noise.
Companies that did well through this period were the ones that figured out the difference and stopped trying to recreate every in-person interaction in digital form. The ones that struggled were the ones that tried to maintain pre-pandemic patterns through video calls, scheduling video meetings every time they would have had a hallway conversation.