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? Sometimes an in-person meeting is a human connection and video might or might not convey that well, but sometimes video is skeuomorphism and both calls and meetings are a way to use unstructured data to transmit structure. So, should the meeting go to a call, or should it go from synchronous to asynchronous (i.e. Slack, Teams, or even email), or should it go to some more structured data form? How many processes in how many industries convert from in-person meetings and phone calls to Zoom, and how many convert to something like Rigup or Honor, or Figma or Frame.io - to tools, structure and workflow? How much clerical work gets automated into structure, and how much time does that create for those in-person meetings where the actual in-person meeting is the point?

Every time we get a new kind of tool, we start by making the new thing fit the existing ways that we work, but then, over time, we change the work to fit the new tool. You’re used to making your metrics dashboard in PowerPoint, and then the cloud comes along and you can make it in Google Docs and everyone always has the latest version. But one day, you realise that the dashboard could be generated automatically and be a live webpage, and no-one needs to make those slides at all. Today, sometimes doing the meeting as a video call is a poor substitute for human interaction, but sometimes it’s like putting the slides in the cloud.

I don’t think we can know which is which right now, but we’re going through a vast, forced public experiment to find out which bits of human psychology will align with which kinds of tool, just as we did with SMS, email or indeed phone calls in previous generations. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of software engineers are cooped up at home getting frustrated with their current tools and wondering if they can spot some pain point, or mechanic, or small difference to the flow, and solve some opportunity that no-one ever quite realised was there. Those insights let Zoom carve out 200m users in a space where all of the incumbent tech giants thought they had established, mature products. In that, Zoom reminds me a lot of Dropbox - everyone told Drew Houston ‘there are dozens of these already’ and he kept replying ‘yes, but which ones do you use?’ A lot of companies will be born in nine months, and more of them will be the next Slack or Dropbox than the next Zoom.

Much the same kinds of questions apply to ecommerce. Again, we’re having a massive forced experiment and we ask what will stick, and again, some of the answer lies in what ‘job’ you were really trying to do. Instead of asking ‘ did that have to be a physical meeting?’ we ask ‘did you have to go to a physical shop?’ That’s a conversation we’ve been having for 20 years - some parts of physical retail are mostly logistics, convert fairly easily to online, and the questions are mostly about unit economics (especially for groceries, which need a whole new logistics chain), and other parts are more about service, recommendation and discovery, are harder to convert, and produce different kinds of innovation. The most interesting parts of last year’s D2C bubble were about experience, not logistics, and it’s ironic that the bubble popped just as COVID started to spread.

Today, though, there are two new parts to that conversation. First, this period of forced experimentation means that people have to at least try experiences such as grocery delivery that they would often have dismissed before - there’s a ‘Green Eggs and Ham’ moment. But second, some physical retail just won’t be there anymore when we go back outside, and some of the demand that has disappeared for the moment won’t come back either. Some retail will go out of business, and that purchasing won’t necessarily go to other physical retailers - there may be no physical option at all anymore, and either way it may go online, but it also may just go away, and the money be spent on something else entirely. Our assumptions of how we buy but also what we buy are being reset.

Even as some companies, sadly, will go out of business, the present surge in demand for online is also creating opportunities for companies in both software and ecommerce. In ‘normal’, steady state growth, the default choices and the incumbent companies soak up most of the new use, unless you carve out some radically new market (such as Warby Parker). But when the incumbents are swamped and everyone is frantically trying everything, it may be easier for new voices to be heard. Again - the market is being reset.

You can see that market reset in another way in two big industries that people have spent decades dreaming of moving to digital and to remote - health and education. Both of these are very obviously now in the same period of forced, accelerated adoption and experimentation, but they are also short-circuiting many of the barriers to adoption and experimentation that have made both industries graveyards for innovation and company creation for a decade or two.

In the past, the problem with both of these markets was that you had to solve the product and user adoption challenges that also apply to productivity, ecommerce or anything else, but then you also had to solve a route to market characterised by multi-year sales cycles and long-term locked-in contracts, a highly bureaucratic customer, complex regulation (often necessarily, which tech people sometimes forget), and complete separation between the purchasers (who care about price and a list of features) and the users (who care about usability and efficiency). All of that meant that creating great tools often turned out to be easier than making a sale and building a business. So, when the irresistible force of lockdown and remote work collides with the immovable object of all the prior barriers to adoption, what happens? In the past few weeks we’ve see adoption in days or weeks that would previously have taken months or years - this NY Times story is a good summary of that for healthcare in the UK. Again, not all of this will stick, sometimes the doctor really does need to be in the same room, and some things will come back. But this time, we also ask whether and which of the external, bureaucratic barriers to adoption and creation will come back, which can be left behind and which really were necessary.

Finally, there’s another kind of ‘left behind’ to think about - though the vast majority of us are now online, there are still tens of millions of people in the developed world who are not, mostly (they say) because they don’t see the point. As the UK data below shows, this tends to skew to older people, and to a lesser extent to lower incomes. This has become particularly relevant now that the old are encouraged to use online grocery delivery. What seems both easy and obvious to you may not to your parents, ‘forced adoption’ or not.