1. Build A Better Conference Call Tool. 2. Fire Management.
Zoom is the pinnacle of modern-day conference call technology. It’s also a piece of shit.
The way America has vaulted business meetings to some taboo of inescapable counterproductivity over the past fifty-odd years, it isn’t difficult to imagine we’ll all wake up one day to learn such practices were surgically cemented by Soviet saboteurs in some marathon Cold War plot. Suffice it to say, if we can’t tell the difference between business as usual and a corporate sabotage conspiracy, we’ve got a gargantuan culture problem on our hands.
To be sure, a culture problem and a technology problem are different animals. But just as policy steps in when culture fails miserably, so does technology. The key to tech-driven culture shifts lies in developing solutions that quantify and democratize what was previously mysterious and inaccessible. And on those counts, Zoom and the like are guilty of simply putting lipstick on a pig, instead of doing the necessary work to realize a) lipstick doesn’t solve this problem, and b) lipstick should be applied to the lips, not the butthole.
