Zoom is looking to capitalize on their popular video chat app with an email and calendar app

Zoom, the maker of Apple’s 2020 “App of the year”, may be moving to create a larger suite of productivity software to compete with Microsoft’s Office, Google’s G-Suite and Slack. Zoom had a stellar year in 2020 with its stock price rising more than 500 percent due to the corona lockdown which equally suppressed the economy at the same time. Now Zoom is looking to expand beyond just video chat and into email and calendar services.

According to a report by The Information, the company is working on an email service that they will begin testing next year with the calendar app coming later on, with no details on its current state of development provided. Both an email and calendar app make a lot of sense for a possible expansion into productivity software. Zoom will need to overcome the two large incumbents in Microsoft’s Office and Google’s G-Suite bundles where both Microsoft Teams and Google Meet are essentially free with their respective subscriptions.

The report suggests that Zoom is interested in building apps even beyond video chat, email and calendar, with “exciting chat features” which sounds like sounds a bit like Slack’s chat app. More competitors in the productivity apps industry will surely benefit us all, let’s hope the past security failures are actually in the past and don’t taint future apps.