We're All Online Now
In January, everyone was online, and probably willing to try anything online. Now we don’t have a choice - we’re shut indoors for weeks or months. What does that means for work? Ecommerce? Health and education? And the people left behind?
Capital Thinking • Issue #569 • View online
People have been talking about remote work and video calls for decades, but now a huge number of ‘quick coffees’ and ‘team stand-ups’ have been displaced onto video almost overnight.
Zoom has gone from 10m to 200m daily users, and Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams combined probably now have more call volume than the entire US mobile network*.
How much of that will go back to cafés and meeting rooms? And are you really ‘just as productive’ at home?
-Benedict Evans
COVID and forced experiments
At the beginning of this year (which now feels like 100 years ago), I gave a presentation on macro trends in tech, at an event in Davos.
There were lots of charts, but I think this one matters most.
In 2017, 40% of new relationships in the USA began in a smartphone app. By 2019 that was probably closer to 50%.
For the last 20 years, people have looked at new digital devices, services and behaviours and said ‘yes, but most people…’
Most people aren’t online; most people don’t have broadband; most people don’t have 3G; most people don’t have a smartphone.
After all, when Netscape launched in 1994 there were less than 50m consumer PCs on the whole planet.
But today, over 4bn people have a smartphone - 75% of the earth’s adult population.
Over 80% of American teenagers have an iPhone.
That still isn’t literally everyone, but the default assumption has reversed. We’re all online now, and, just as importantly, we’re all willing to use this for any part of our lives, if you can work out the right experience and business model.
Today, anyone will do anything online.
This isn’t the same as saying that everyone will do everything online.
You might compare ‘online’ to cars - not everyone has a car, and no-one does everything with a car, but there is no part of the population and no activity or part of life or the economy where cars do not apply.
That was January, but now most of us are shut up inside for weeks and quite probably longer, so (besides other more important things) we wonder how this might be accelerated.
Everyone is now being forced to use a lot more remote and online tools, so what will change?
Some things were very clearly already happening and will now happen faster, possibly much faster, and some things that we’re forced to try now might not have happened without this.
But, not all of this adoption will stick once we do get back to normal. We’ll try everything, because we’re forced to, but not all of it will work.
So, which is which?
Most obviously, people have been talking about remote work and video calls for decades, but now a huge number of ‘quick coffees’ and ‘team stand-ups’ have been displaced onto video almost overnight.
Zoom has gone from 10m to 200m daily users, and Zoom, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams combined probably now have more call volume than the entire US mobile network*.
How much of that will go back to cafés and meeting rooms? And are you really ‘just as productive’ at home?
Well, it depends what you’re trying to do.
If the job is ‘forming a human connection’ or ‘empathy’, then a video call might not be the right approach, and we may go back to coffee.
If the job is to exchange information or update a project status, then video might be fine.
But you could also ask whether it needs to be a call either - is that really the job you’re trying to do?
Benedict Evans