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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