Video chat tools like Zoom do well to emulate workspaces but lack flexibility in creative presentation and miss the subtleties of in-person interactions
Software tools simulate work. They should really let us put on a show. — Did you find yourself, over these last fascinating and upsetting weeks, always on camera? Tweets: @jaycuthrell Tweets: Jay Cuthrell / @jaycuthrell : Try using @MiroHQ instead of native video chat add-on whiteboards ( looking you @zoom_us @Webex and @MicrosoftTeams ) and you'll quickly see the entire workspace emulation market is ripe for innovation and tactical feature M&A. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
When COVID sent work home in March 2020, Zoom won on plumbing, not presence: its simple client and sub-150-millisecond latency made it the default, as its breakout profile documented at the moment of conquest. But the Wired piece argues that winning the pipe is not the same as winning the medium — native whiteboards in Zoom, Webex, and Microsoft Teams trail dedicated tools like Miro, and the grid-of-faces format flattens the performance dimension of presenting to a room.
That gap has been the opening for a second wave all along: Around launched two days after this piece betting that auto-zoom and noise canceling could make video feel less like surveillance, rethinking the format rather than adding features; Branch, Gather, and Huddle later built spatial virtual HQs where movement replaces the meeting grid; and by January 2021 the incumbents had responded by piling on interactivity features across 2020, per the WSJ retrospective.
First-order effects
- Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Webex are cast as emulating the physical workspace rather than enabling creative presentation, leaving room for Miro-style specialists to own collaborative surfaces natively inside their own products.
Second-order effects
- Startups like Around and the virtual-HQ builders (Branch, Gather, Huddle) compete not on latency or reliability — where Zoom already leads — but on presence and flexibility, forcing incumbents into tactical feature catch-up or acquisition, exactly the M&A dynamic Jay Cuthrell flags.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the video-call grid becomes one surface among many: Zoom's planned photorealistic AI avatars in 2025 (an animated stand-in with head and arms) points toward mediated presence replacing the always-on camera — the same subtlety problem this piece identified being solved synthetically.
The trend: Video conferencing is splitting from workspace emulation into a broader presence layer — spatial offices, dedicated canvases, and AI avatars — where whoever owns expressive presence, not the call itself, captures the value.