Zoom, the videoconferencing platform that profited substantially from remote work during the pandemic, is now asking employees to return to the office. Its CEO, Eric Yuan, claims Zoom meetings don’t let people build trust or be innovative.

[…]

Yuan explained that trust is essential “for everything,” and he finds it hard to build not only that but also innovation and debates over Zoom.

“Quite often, you come up with great ideas, but when we are all on Zoom, it’s really hard,” Yuan said, according to Insider. “We cannot have a great conversation. We cannot debate each other well because everyone tends to be very friendly when you join a Zoom call.”

  • d-RLY?
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    10 months ago

    You are thinking about it all wrong. You see such amazing innovators like him have figured out the ouroboros of capitalism/consumerism. First you figure out a trend/fad that you can manage to fill/do well enough to get big. Then you do everything possible to milk that shit for everything while it is peaking. Then once basically saturation is hit, you don’t try to just do lame shit like “just focus on realistic sustainability.” Fuck no!

    You instead take your time on the up-swing to plan how to again innovate by going all-in on making not the original thing the new thing. Start really getting the idea of the old thing to seem lame/boring/frustrating at best, or maybe show that it is unhealthy/damaging at worst. Then push for how much better whatever the thing before the current thing is by using the mass consumer/corporate amnesia to paint the old thing as being 100% new and cool. Though you can also point to it as being a old/retro idea in concept (hit them in the “feels”/“member berries”), but just make sure to change wording and/or anything and everything that are just the most surface level to show how innovative you and your ideas are.

    Once the new-old thing becomes the new-old-current thing, you just keep on swallowing that tail feeding that ouroboros by prepping for going back around again!

    /s

    Though I am sure that he did make sure to put as much of the “earnings” he got paid (both as the CEO and as a shareholder) to buy up as much newly cheap as fuck commercial spaces as possible. Given how many places went out of business or didn’t renew leases to cut costs during the Covid years. I am sure they were able to acquire a lot of spaces in order to be ready for what they (and really many people) thought would happen after all the restrictions/legal liability of being back in a office setting went away. Just wasn’t prepared for so many larger companies to see office spaces as being mostly a big cost that had been cut.

    I personally like that it seems so many people are at least getting to work from home if they do function better there. Though I am kind of glad that I don’t work in a field that would mean I had to work from home. I would be way to annoyed at the feeling of never leaving the office (even if I were able to only do work things in one room and leave the rest of the house to non-work life). I also do worry that not being physically around other workers will make it easier for companies to much more quietly purge staff without anyone noticing. Which would be perfect for controlling the narrative and keeping workers more isolated and much less likely to even flirt with the idea of organizing.

    Even with all that, I do imagine that the comfort of being at home does really help a lot of people work much better than the office. So maybe this guy will just get fucked and lose a lot of money. Landlords are leeches anyway.