Remote meeting technology is here to stay for the foreseeable future, but will Zoom (ZM -1.73%) be able to grow its product ecosystem successfully? In this clip from "The Rank" on Motley Fool Live, recorded on May 2, Motley Fool contributor Matt Frankel discusses what Zoom needs to do in order to maintain and grow its ecosystem.
Matt Frankel: Here's my take. Both of you guys make very valid points. I think that the thesis is different than in 2019. Kind of how Danny was saying, there's no case where it should be worth less than it was back then. And I would push back a little on that to say that the thesis back in 2019 was that, gradually over the next decade or so, everyone's going to adopt remote meeting technology and things like that. That was the main thesis pre-pandemic. All of that growth was pulled forward. All of it, in my opinion. Their core product was pulled forward. Everybody who has a reason to use Zoom is using Zoom now. Especially domestically, they're not going to grow their U.S. user base for people doing what we're doing from here. And my issue, now the thesis has shifted to, Zoom's membership base is this big. We're going to make a bunch of adjacent products that they can use now. That's the thesis right now, is all the other stuff they could do with the platform. And I'm just not sold on all the new products. It's kind of my biggest issue with Zoom. I don't think they're going to hemorrhage users. I think that a lot of the individual users, people who were using Zoom to call their grandma or whatever during the pandemic are going to go away, but those weren't really monetized by the platform anyway. Most of those used the free version of the site, things like that. So I think all the business users are going to remain. I'm just not convinced at their ability to grow their product ecosystem as much as a lot of other people seem to be.
