Zoom added a mail feature. Tell me why?

Because product people need to validate their existence by adding features to put on their resume and show &quot;progress&quot;, businesses are always trying to &quot;grow&quot;...<p>Our tech stacks are steaming piles of ass because applications are never &quot;finished&quot;. We even do this ourselves, apps that dont get updates are looked down on more often than being seen as &quot;complete&quot;

It&#x27;s because zoom is losing some market share to MS Teams, because Teams is able to bundle a bunch of other services in addition to video meetings -- email, CMS, chat, calendar, etc.<p>Everyone who uses Teams hates it, but to a detached executive who doesn&#x27;t use it, it checks off a lot more required technology boxes, and a company can get away with <i>just</i> using Teams and not having Zoom, but they can&#x27;t do it the other way without buying a bunch of other products from other vendors.

Always hilarious to see Zawinski’s Law in action: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softwareengineering.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;150254&#x2F;what-does-jamie-zawinskis-law-mean" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;softwareengineering.stackexchange.com&#x2F;questions&#x2F;1502...</a>

My guess is that monetizing a video conferencing service simply isn&#x27;t a viable long-term strategy so the company knows that they&#x27;ll eventually need to develop new revenue sources.<p>I&#x27;m skeptical Zoom will be able to parlay their success in video conferencing to grow into a full business collaboration suite, but it&#x27;s worth a shot. They got lucky that Microsoft and Google messed with their popular video conferencing services just before a global pandemic, but I expect that eventually other product suites will build in enough video conferencing that few people will bother with a 3rd party one. After all, even with incompetent management you can build a passable clone as long as you pour enough money into it.

All those apps are Office in the limit; it’s just that some won’t make it. People want their office suite integrated into one Swiss Army knife in the hopes of a better experience than a dozen specialized tools which only marginally cooperate.

I’m not nearly as cynical on this one, and I’m surprised about the negativity.<p>Small business mail sucks. It’s either Microsoft Office (feels like ancient software if you scratch too deep - some settings require remote PowerShell!), Google Workspace (do I need to say more?), or Zoho (the world’s greatest collection of 80% complete software).<p>Competition is a good thing.

Zawinski’s Law in action?

A company that has a commodity videoconferencing app is clearly not worth $20 billion dollars. Zoom needs to parlay its COVID good luck into something bigger (e.g. an office productivity&#x2F;collaboration) to try and justify that $20B. It&#x27;s misguided to try and pin this on product people. This mission comes from way above their pay grade.

It is quite hilarious that huge product teams believe that customers or users wants more features

&quot;Google Search added a mail feature. Tell me why?&quot;<p>Have people lost their mind?

It looks like zoom product team thinks they are a feature factory

I don&#x27;t know the details of this feature, but as someone in the enterprise software space, I&#x27;d place money on a large customer specifically asking for this feature.

It might be convenient to have email pertaining to a specific project tied to the Zoom collaboration.<p>Until having a few random eggs in a different basket becomes a total hassle.

What I find funny is that Teams does not have mail... It has everything else, but not mail... I might sometimes use mail there, but oh well...

Wasn&#x27;t there a joke going around that every commercial software eventually bloats to include a calendar and email functionality?