Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It
from the heckuva-job,-brownie dept
Pretty much every time Verizon wanders outside of its core competencies (operating telecom networks, lobbying to hamstring competition, undermining the most basic of regulatory oversight), the telco amusingly falls flat on its face. It’s quite honestly starting to get a little weird.
Whether it’s the company’s Go90 video streaming platform, its video joint venture with RedBox, its news website Sugarstring (which you may recall tried to ban reporters from talking about surveillance or net neutrality), its app store, its “me too” VCAST apps, the billions wasted on Yahoo, the effort to run Tumblr into the ground, or any of a dozen other attempted pivots, Verizon has failed. Usually semi-spectacularly.
During peak COVID Verizon spent somewhere around $400 million to acquire BlueJeans, which was pitched as a videoconferencing alternative to Zoom. But of course in typical Verizon fashion the app went nowhere, and in an email to users Verizon stated they’ll be shutting the service down August 31. In the email, Verizon paints the app nobody has heard of as “award winning”:
BlueJeans is an award-winning product that connects our customers around the world, but we have made this decision due to the changing market landscape.
These repeated failures by Verizon would be less of an issue if the company didn’t have such a long history of skimping on essential broadband network upgrades. Whether it’s New York, New Jersey, or Pennsylvania, the telco has a long history of taking tax breaks, subsidies, or regulatory favors in exchange for promised DSL to fiber network upgrades that somehow never fully materialize.
While with the other hand, Verizon adores simply setting vast swaths of money on fire to please Wall Street’s myopic lust for “growth for growth’s sake” projects, even if execs routinely lack the chops to manage any of the efforts. With Verizon now facing major financial remediation headaches due to a lot of lead in their cables, much of that cash would probably come in handy.
Despite endless pretense, telecoms can’t innovate. At least outside of finding creative new ways to over-charge captive customers or undermining government oversight. It’s not clear how many examples we need before Verizon and the folks pouring money into these doomed projects figure that out.
Filed Under: app, dsl, failed pivot, fiber, innovation, telecom, videoconferencing
Companies: bluejeans, verizon
Comments on “Verizon Fails Again, Shutters Attempted Zoom Alternative BlueJeans After Paying $400 Million For It”
Classical random words bullshit. You know that you’ve completely failed when can you cannot explain you decision with simple words that make sense together. And Verizon still fails to understand that.
Re:
That’s execuspeak for “we fucked up”
The wonders of market capture. They burn money like no other incompetent would and are still profitable.
Weird, I actually have heard of this. A company my company used for contract labor was using it. Hopefully they already switched to a service the will still exist next month.
VCs pull another fast one
You can blame Verizon because it was their choice in the end, but you know the VCs who funded it were shopping it around to cash out at a prime time and doing a hard sell, talking to friends on the board and what not. And it actually had some customers.
It also did better than Hoot, InterCall’s Zoom copy, which used some underlying tech from BlueJeans. But InterCall has been on a long downward slide since the early 2000s.
Changing Market Landscape
Corporate-speak for “our competitors have totally outclassed us, we couldn’t catch up short a miracle from God, and we’ve decided to quietly kill it and then never mention it again, while signing a deal with one of the competitors we couldn’t beat.”
I attended a grand total of one Bluejeans meeting, 7 or 8 years ago on a project that involved construction. After logging on, within a few minutes it was clear that the architect’s screen share was out of sync. Within a 15 minutes, it was at least 2 minutes out of sync. Nobody spoke up because the architect was kind of an ass.
Guess which project went 5 or 6 months overtime?
You’ve got to admit it is impressive that they got outclassed by something that for the most part only exists on paper.
Worse than Tumblr
Verizon’s ownership of Tumblr started with around $4.8 billion to buy Oath and ended with Verizon selling Tumblr for a mere $3 million.
Facebook used Bluejeans among other companies and videoconferencing usage is still at near 2020 levels so Verizon running it into the ground is right up there with Cerberus running Remington into bankruptcy during the longest sustained boom in gun sales in the US. Of course the executives and investment bankers pocketed millions in bonuses and fees so they are fine with this
Wasted opportunity
Pity. I’ve never personally used BlueJeans, but around 2016 it occupied a space where its users felt it had few competitors. BigBlueButton and Jitsi later eclipsed it, but it takes talent to burn it to the ground. I hope at least they sell/migrate the users to some decent competitor.
As an actual BlueJeans user...
I have been forced to use BlueJeans almost daily for the past couple of years in a support role for a single customer.
Most of the time, I use WebEx for remote support sessions and Teams for internal meetings, but this customer didn’t allow my company to use “our” remote support tools because they had licensed BlueJeans.
BlueJeans has always felt like a second-class tool. Sometimes it would grab the wrong audio devices, seemingly at random. It would drop sessions after an hour for no apparent reason and some days it would just flat-out not work at all. The user interface was non-intuitive, not particularly customizable, and sometimes downright annoying.
I will always have fond memories of the first day I don’t have to use it anymore.
They just bought
A bunch of smaller Pay as you go, Phone companies.
REALLY messed a few things up.
wasted opportunity
Just about EVERY wire line customer could have had fiber optics to the home deployed and fully available for order WITH THOSE BILLIONS of WA$TED expenditures! The deployment speeds could push out of the hundreds of megabits into the gigabits with affordable rates, but NO… a push for the latest trend, and wireless took priority over prudence EVERY SINGLE TIME! Maybe it’s time for an activist investor to clear house with management and get the REAL JOB DONE of being both a WIRE LINE (first) AND A WIRELESS TELECOM (second)!