Six Months In, the Remote-Work Tool Pile Just Keeps Growing
Zoom, Slack, and Teams usage is still far above pre-pandemic levels, and the feature wars between them are heating up.
We’re roughly six months into this whole remote-work experiment now, and if you were hoping things would settle into a quiet steady state, that hasn’t happened. Usage of Zoom, Slack, and Microsoft Teams is still way above where it was back in February and March. This isn’t a temporary spike that faded once people got used to working from home — it looks more like a permanent shift in how a huge chunk of the workforce operates day to day.
Zoom in particular has had a wild year on the revenue side. The growth numbers coming out of the company have been the kind of thing that makes hardware and software vendors alike sit up and pay attention. A video app that most people outside of enterprise IT had barely heard of eighteen months ago is now a household name, verb-ified the way “Google it” became shorthand for search. That’s not nothing, and it’s clearly not lost on Microsoft or Slack, both of which have been shipping features at a pace that suggests genuine competitive panic rather than routine roadmap execution.
The feature arms race
The obvious battleground right now is anything that makes video calls feel less like staring at a grid of tired faces in front of a bookshelf. Virtual backgrounds have gone from novelty to near-default in a lot of meetings — partly for privacy, partly because not everyone wants coworkers staring at their actual living room. Breakout rooms are the other big one: splitting a large call into smaller discussion groups and then pulling everyone back together is a surprisingly hard problem to get right technically, and it’s become a checkbox feature that every platform now needs.
Calendar integration is the less flashy but arguably more important front. The dream, as far as I can tell, is a world where you never have to think about which app a meeting lives in — you just see it on your calendar, click join, and the right tool opens. Microsoft has an obvious advantage here given how much of the corporate world already lives inside Outlook and Office 365, but Zoom and Slack aren’t ceding that ground without a fight, both leaning hard into integrations and add-ons of their own.
Where this leaves us
What strikes me is how little consolidation has happened despite all this competition. You’d think after six months companies would have picked a lane — one video tool, one chat tool — but in practice most workplaces I hear about are running two or three of these platforms simultaneously, often for no better reason than “that’s what this client uses” or “our sales team likes this one.” The tool sprawl is real, and I don’t see a strong signal yet from any single vendor that they’re about to win outright.
If anything, the next few months seem likely to bring more feature convergence rather than less — everyone copying everyone else’s best ideas until the products look increasingly similar under the hood. Whether that ends in one platform pulling away, or in permanent multi-tool fatigue for the rest of us, is still an open question.