Member-only story
Can’t See the Future? Business Leader Says Wait 45 Days
John Chambers Offers a Glimpse Through Murky Waters to the Changed-Forever World Ahead
As we settle in to a coronavirus world, we face a greater degree of uncertainty than at any time in living memory. The next few quarters are a cipher we cannot read. We dread the coming months. We know they’ll be bad, but we have no idea how bad. The water we’re swimming through is black. We are thrashing in a pool without bottom.
While we wait in shock for the virus tsunami to pass over, we turn to videoconferencing and chatting to bide our time and be sociable while also distant. Zoom gets big points here. The company scaled up its operations almost instantly — starting in January, when end user video traffic began to spike in China and the rest of East Asia due to the growing pandemic — by leasing more virtual machines from the likes of Dell and Amazon. Video’s moment in the sun is now because finally we have both the need and the capacity.
The economics in favor of videoconferencing have always been overwhelming. It’s much cheaper to meet online than in person. Can you imagine the tab for a hundred people flying in from all over for face time in some garden spot like Half Moon Bay? And it’s not just the key one-hour all-up meeting. It’s days getting in…
