Microsoft is trying aggressively to destroy both Zoom and Slack by pushing Teams as "free" (i.e. "Look, it's already included in your Office 365 plan!").
Teams video is... fine (other than the awful UX) which is a death knell for Zoom... but for everything else it is HORRIBLE. As a communication and collaboration platform, Teams is productivity and efficiency cyanide. It is just so badly designed and organized. It's a mess.
But companies will switch anyway, because it's "cheaper"... consequences be damned.
Programmers think they're special and they're not. Code is code. I am saying this as a programmer: We are replaceable. When we've been on the job for 10 years we're costing them more than the new dev they could hire who could just build on top of our work and mimic it.
"Best employees" is relative to who's talking. The best employees to shareholders are the cheap ones.
Code written by a junior dev who doesn't have experience with the platform is not equivalent to code written by a senior dev who's touched large swaths of code.
If he's just replicating what's there? Yeah it is. He doesn't understand why but he can write it all the same. He can't lead the tech team on it but he can build the product up from where it's at. And developers understand that. It's literally how most of us learned in the first place.
This terrifies me. If I am forced to return to the office to do the same thing I do very, very well at home, my entire life will significantly change for the worse. It's not fair that a few deuschbags cab ruin someone else's life so easily and carelessly.
Considering that Zoom has not been doing well, this is probably a desperation move. They are hoping to get a short term boost by getting expensive employees out the door, without severance packages and stocks vesting. On the downside, their best engineers are going to be the first ones to walk. So, I would expect the platform to stagnate. I’d argue it’s a corollary to Enshitification. The company is now looking to monetize and cut costs. Keeping the high performance, high pay engineers on staff is no longer seen as needed for profit. The company will adopt policies which de-prioritize the technology and instead push marketing and fiddling around with the UI to “keep the platform fresh”. Hard to maintain features will be discontinued. Popular features will get locked behind higher and higher paywalls, forcing individuals an companies to pay more to access the same feature set. And this continues until the company either gets rolled over by the Microsoft Juggernaut; or, some small start-up comes along and eats the company’s lunch. Ultimately, this move should be seen more as a sign of panic at the top and less as an existential threat to remote work.
And the odds are good that small startup will be fully remote. The financial and recruiting advantages of not having an office will give them a huge leg up over "hurr durr you need to breathe each other's air to work good" companies.
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