A Noun Ate a Verb

A noun ate a verb last year.

As users, we preferred the verb, when that's all we needed.

But the noun ate it. In a way that was entirely predictable.

Zoom has been eaten by Teams.

Because friction beats features every time.

And it's an example of why platforms do, and will continue to, win. And it's why you need to build up Orchestration as your superpower.

Humans don't optimise for quality. We optimise for friction removal. Behavioural economists call this the Principle of Least Effort, how we naturally gravitate toward minimum friction, even when alternatives are superior. We're "cognitive misers", conserving mental energy by defaulting to whatever requires the least effort. We may try the better tool, but we'll use the easier one.

That's not cynicism, it's behavioural economics. And it explains why Zoom spent tens of millions on Super Bowl advertising last week, why Slack sold to Salesforce for $28 billion, and why the specialised AI tools you're evaluating right now will probably be dead in three years.

When B2B software companies suddenly need celebrity comedians and Super Bowl slots to protect market position, they've lost the enterprise conversation. The bundled platforms have won not by being better, but by removing friction. And what's happening to Zoom right now by watching Microsoft Teams win through bundling rather than superiority, is exactly what's happening across the AI landscape.

In team sports, coordinated adequacy beats uncoordinated excellence. Zoom was the hero of COVID. They saved us when the world moved online overnight. They became a verb. None of that matters now. Because Microsoft figured out that winning isn't about having the best video tool. It's about having video that already plays on the same team as email, calendar, documents, chat and an AI copilot. Individual excellence without coordination loses to coordinated adequacy. The game is won in the passes, not the highlights.

The quality gap doesn't matter when the friction gap is massive.

Zoom announced this week that they're premiering a major brand campaign called "Zoom Ahead" on New Year's Eve during the college football playoffs, with continued spots running through the Super Bowl in February. The creative, produced by "No Notes" (an agency founded by Saturday Night Live comedian Colin Jost), features SNL cast member Bowen Yang and positions Zoom as the user-friendly alternative to "complex collaboration tools."

The campaign includes what Zoom clearly thinks is their strongest argument. Colin Jost himself provided the quote: "Of all the virtual meeting options, Zoom definitely has the best brand name. I've never once said, 'Let's Teams!'"

He's right. Nobody says "Let's Teams."

But here's what thousands of IT directors said last year: "We already pay for Teams. Why are we paying for Zoom?"

Jost's joke is funny and completely irrelevant. Zoom isn't spending tens of millions on Super Bowl advertising because they're winning. They're spending it because they're losing. And they're losing not to a better product but to friction removal. The campaign itself is evidence of everything wrong with Zoom's strategic position.

Even Zoom's own CMO, Kim Storin, admitted in a Marketing Dive interview: "We don't have an awareness problem, but we did have a perception challenge." That's corporate-speak for: everyone knows who we are, but they're choosing someone else anyway. The board told her she has "permission to be iconic." Permission to be iconic. That's what you say when the product strategy has stalled and you're hoping brand magic can save you (and, I might add, the permission to be iconic is granted sparingly to brands by their fans, not by their boards).

March 2020: Offices emptied. Schools closed. Life moved online in a week. Traditional enterprise video conferencing tools buckled under impossible load. Their complexity, designed for IT administrators, became fatal when suddenly everyone needed to work from home.

Zoom saved us. Click a link. Join a meeting. It just worked. My mum used it. They went from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 to 300 million by April 2020. They didn't just grow. They became essential. The verb that defined how we survived isolation.

That was five years ago. Here's what happened next: Microsoft looked at Zoom's success and asked a different question than "how do we build better video?" They asked "how do we make video part of the team our customers already have?" So they took Teams, which was adequate at video, nothing special, and made it coordinate seamlessly with Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, SharePoint, OneDrive. Not better tools. Better coordination. You're in an email thread, someone suggests a call, you click, you're in Teams video, someone shares a document, it opens in Word, integrated, coordinated, orchestrated. The handoffs disappeared.

Google did the same with Meet and Workspace. Not better video. Just video that already plays with Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive. One click from email to meeting. No context switching. No separate app. No friction.

And "adequate video with zero friction" beat "excellent video with multiple handoffs" every single time. Not because quality doesn't matter. Because friction matters more. We're cognitive misers and we conserve mental energy. We may try the better tool, but we'll use the easier one.

Quality loses to bundling when the quality gap is narrow and the friction gap is wide.

Right now, the AI industry is exactly where Zoom was in 2021. Point solutions everywhere. Specialised excellence at every position. CMOs building complex workflows: Claude for reasoning tasks, Perplexity for research, Midjourney for images, a plethora of options for GenVideo, specialised tools for specialised needs. Best-in-class at every position. Like assembling an all-star team from different sports.

Watch what happens in real work with these excellent individual tools: Research question in email. Copy to Perplexity. Get results. Paste into Claude for analysis. Get insights. Open document. Paste insights. Need an image. Open Midjourney. Generate. Download. Upload to presentation. Each handoff is friction. Each context switch is a decision point. Each tool change is an opportunity for workflow failure.

And the platforms are bundling adequate AI that eliminates every single handoff. Microsoft Copilot integrates across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams. Ask a question in email. Get an answer from AI. Insert into document. Create presentation. Schedule meeting. All within the same ecosystem. No handoffs. No context switches. No friction. The AI already plays on the team with tools people use every day.

Google Gemini does the same throughout Workspace. OpenAI partners with Microsoft. The platforms aren't racing to build the best AI at individual tasks. They're racing to build AI teams that already know how to coordinate with the tools customers already use. Not better tools. Better coordination. Not individual excellence. Team play.

This is friction economics. And friction economics always favour bundling when quality gaps narrow. The Principle of Least Effort applies to AI adoption just as it applied to video conferencing. Users may try the specialised tools, but they'll use the bundled ones.

Standalone excellence loses to platform adequacy when platforms eliminate friction through coordination.

The Principle of Least Effort isn't a bug in human behaviour. It's a feature. We're cognitive misers because mental energy is finite and valuable. We satisfice because optimisation is exhausting. We choose the path of least resistance because resistance is costly. The platforms understand this. They're not building better tools. They're building easier paths.

The AI industry is learning the same lesson this year. The specialised tools, the point solutions, the best-in-class individual performers, they're Zoom in 2021. They're excellent. They're differentiated. They're trapped in boxes they built themselves. Because the platforms aren't competing on quality. They're competing on friction elimination. They're building teams that already know how to play together.

In team sports, coordinated adequacy beats uncoordinated excellence. The game is won in the passes. And the platforms own the passing lanes.

If you're building your AI strategy around best-of-breed point solutions, ask yourself: what's the total friction cost of those handoffs? Because the 15% quality advantage disappears when integration takes six months and your team reverts to what's already in their inbox.

Are you building your strategy around individual excellence or team coordination? Because only one of those survives what comes next.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 5 January 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.