Back in late 2019 I met someone from Zoom who was visiting London. The company, then as now, offered free video-conferencing calls for up to 40 minutes, but charged a fee of around £10 a month to users who wanted longer calls.
Towards the end of the conversation, I flippantly asked what I thought was a hypothetical question: ‘How much would you charge to give full Zoom access to the whole UK population?’ I didn’t think much more about it, but to my surprise they came back to me a few days later: ‘If you know anyone in the government who’d be interested in this, we’d like to talk.’
In the end, I never got round to doing anything, and then the pandemic hit, which solved their adoption problem overnight. Nevertheless it remains an interesting thought experiment. Firstly, why might this have been a good idea? And why did I never bother taking it further?
It’s wonderful we don’t have to pay for email software, but the price is that email technology has barely advanced in 20 years
One reason I was interested was because Zoom was not Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft.
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