Still to this day, I find my ICloud sync folders can be fairly unreliable (files will take a mysteriously long time to appear once in a while) - I've never had anything like that sort of an issue with Dropbox (although I haven't used it in a while).
When pigs manage to fly. FTFY
If your premise is that Google will stop being so frequently incompetent at product and deliver a killer competitor for Zoom, then it's far more likely that Zoom's future is a bright one.
> Zoom really strikes me as the Dropbox of 2020 ... Zoom will probably suffer the same fate
Nobody killed Dropbox either, they have continued to expand year after year. Dropbox has grown its business every year for the past decade plus. You act like the competition wiped them out, when nothing like that has happened at all: Dropbox doubled the size of their business over the prior three fiscal years (2017-2019). I'm pretty sure that reasonably qualifies as thriving.
Zoom is growing even faster than Dropbox did, they'll be larger than Dropbox in another few quarters. So how many years will it take for the competitors to catch up in a way that considerably slows Zoom down and how large will Zoom be at that point?
Chat is not a multi-billion dollar company.
Video conferencing is not a multi-billion dollar company.
File hosting is not a multi-billion dollar company.
The company that does all three of these things in an integrated fashion is. No single feature constitutes a platform or ecosystem, and there's certainly no defensive moat.
These single-purpose companies are just minnows to the bigger fish that have gargantuan budgets, extensive engineering headcount, and rich product ecosystems to pair these features with.
That's a naive perspective of the role Slack plays in many organizations.
For example, much of the monitoring and alerting workflows in our company run through Slack. We use it more than email. We can rollback production deployments with Slack commands as well as interact with our staging environments - and that's just the tip of the iceberg for the workflows we've built out with Slack's APIs.
Not every integration makes sense. I know some companies doing business logic automation in Google Docs, and I'm also reminded of Twitch Plays Pokemon. Just because you make a choice to integrate with a product doesn't mean it's widely adopted, practical, or wise.
Or supported.
Edit: I want to clarify. I don't mean to be rude, and I wasn't in the room when y'all made these decisions. I just don't think Slack is the ship you want to tie yourselves to, especially not as your control plane.
Sorry, but I have to post this now:
https://github.com/learnk8s/xlskubectl
"xlskubectl integrates Google Spreadsheet with Kubernetes."
"You can finally administer your cluster from the same spreadsheet that you use to track your expenses."
It's a (working) joke of course, but a hilarious one.
I would never want my production deployment rollback tied to my instant messenger plugin working.
Quick math, assume one tool is charging $8 per employee per month (meaning $100 a year). It only takes one million customers to be a billion dollar company ($100M yearly recurring revenues at 10x valuation).
And one million customers is just a couple of fortune 100. The whole market is orders of magnitude bigger than that!
So Google? Microsoft might count too, but I haven't used their suite in a while.
Also, I would think integrated email would be necessary too.