Verizon snags Zoom's (smaller) video rival BlueJeans — goodbye "One & Only"
Should've called it "Khakis"... BlueJeans is a videoconference service like Zoom, except it only services businesses, it has no free version, and it's way less popular than Zoom. But Verizon noticed BlueJeans from across the room — now it's acquiring it for less than $500M.
- ICYMI, videoconferencing has been having a moment. Zoom jumped from 10M customers in December to 200M customers in March — an unbelievable boost driven by virus lockdowns and office closures.
- BlueJeans is only used by businesses, unlike Zoom. It has 15K companies signed up for its service. Forget about the Middle School Reunion happy hour — BlueJeans is strictly 'bout that office life. And Verizon's into it.
Blue Jeans, White Collar... Verizon is obsessed with rolling out its faster 5G network. The biggest adopters of this 5G tech will be Verizon's corporate customers — aka, the ones who pay for Verizon WiFi for their offices and Verizon data for employee cell phones.
- Verizon can offer its corporate customers BlueJeans' video conference tech to build telemedicine, virtual learning, and remote training services.
- Verizon also digs BlueJeans' encryption, which could shield it from Zoom-style privacy issues (never heard of BlueJeans-bombing).
BlueJeans will no longer be a "One & Only" company... once it's part of Verizon. "One & Only" companies only do one thing — but they do it really well, and are successful because of that. Zoom and Netflix are successful O&O companies. Skype used to be an O&O company, until it got acquired by Microsoft in 2011. It went from being super popular to being barely used. "One of Many" companies can get neglected post-acquisition — TBD if BlueJeans is next.