As Covid-19 Forces Millions Of Us To Work From Home, Which Are The Best Tools For The Job? – Forbes
It’s worth reading Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield’s comments on Twitter about the changes his life and his company have been subjected to over the last two weeks, as half the world has been locked down by the coronavirus pandemic, with a record number of people using the app to work from home. The company’s shares have risen 15% in the wake of the comments.
Slack is not alone: similar tools, such as Microsoft Teams, has seen use grew more than 40% in a week, while announcing new features. At one point, the increase in users caused outages.
But the real winner to emerge from the global lockdown is Zoom. The company — founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan after leaving his job as VP of Engineering at Webex, a subsidiary of Cisco, and which went public in April 2019 with a valuation of $16 billion — is now worth $39.3 billion, and says it wants to be much more than a simple video conferencing application and instead take center stage in areas ranging from collaborative work to online teaching.