How did Zoom become the default teleconferencing software?

Factual Questions
1

I’m a little bit baffled by this… I’ve done online meetings for years, and I literally hadn’t heard of Zoom, or if I had, it was more or less in the context of “another teleconferencing software product”, but not as an industry leader or anything.

I mean, in the past decade, I’ve used GotoMeeting, Skype, Teams, Webex pretty frequently over that decade, and used Adobe Connect very infrequently (one vendor used it).

But no Zoom. Not until about March of this year with the start of the lockdowns. I’m still a bit mystified about how it escaped my radar and ended up being such a big deal, and I’m even more mystified about why- it doesn’t seem to add anything that the others don’t, isn’t any easier to use, and doesn’t seem to be better quality either.

Anyone have any insight into this?

2

It’s as fool-proof as can be. I’ve taught my 90-year-old, early-Alzheimer’s father-in-law to use it. Even Meet is not a simple.

I think they might have used money to be very visible when the lockdown came and it was possibly one or two big users who made it famous. Still, the people at Skype must have comitte massive seppuku because this was their time to shine, everyone had had Skype, but not closing down after your pressed the X was the key to hatred.
Zoom was the magic combo of easy to use a you didn’t need to have the app.

But, no, I really don’t know the answer

3

Cheap and easy to use. Beats technical quality every time in the software market.

4

Did some of Zoom’s ease of use come from lack of security? I remember hearing about issues early on with people being able to jump into random meetings and cause problems by doing stuff like streaming inappropriate videos.

5

I can only speak for myself. First let me say that I find Skype very irritating even for making simple phone calls. I have never used a Skype to Skype call.

I first heard of Zoom only last March when friend wrote to ask if I would like to meet her there. “What’s Zoom?” I asked. She told me to google it, which I did and it was trivial to install and simple to use. Then I suggested to my children (three in three widely different places) if they would be interested in a Zoom meeting. We have met every Thursday evening since early April and will meet tonight. Meantime I have had several more meetings with that friend. My wife and I meet her and her husband.

Since retirement, one connection I keep up with the university is to act as chair for PhD final exams. These have now been moved to Zoom. I did two last week, one this week and will do one next week. The graduate school sets up the meetings and manages all technical details.

A couple weeks ago, I was invited to a Google Meet affair. I googled it, installed it, had to get a UID and password, then convince it that I did not want to be registered under my gmail account (which I basically never use). It was a real hassle. And for what? It does the same things.

So ease of use is probably the best answer to your question.

6

I work at a University and we’ve had a contract with Zoom for a couple of years before the pandemic hit. We used to use Skype, but it just had a really terrible interface and between trying to get clients to understand the difference between Skype for Business and Skype and Skype’s buggy presentations, Zoom was so easy. So there was a mass exodus in my college at least. I’m guessing that momentum was happening in other places and spilled over to the home sector when video chat became high demand.

7

Zoom always had options for great security but the default security settings left things wide open. The biggest change Zoom made when security became an problem was simply changing the default security settings.

The other issue was Zoom servers being able to “see” the content of the meetings. Some people felt this was a misrepresentation as it claimed the meeting traffic was encrypted. And it was encrypted, just not for the internal Zoom servers themselves.

Zoom was and still is the best and easiest teleconferencing software.

8

Unlike Skype, you don’t have to have an account to join a Zoom call. So, it’s super easy to join a call, the software works on all the platforms, and it’s free.

Google has made their video conferencing much easier since then, but it was late to the party.

Webex Meetings targeted corporate users (is it free to host? I don’t know), whereas Zoom targeted individuals.

I too hadn’t heard of Zoom before the lockdown, but most people in non-work settings seem to prefer it now.

9

My university has had an enterprise license for Zoom for several years, so we were all familiar with it. Prior to the pandemic we frequently used it for meetings across sites, so it was not a big jump to using it for all meetings.

Zoom has several features that make it useful in a corporate or academic setting. They have “Zoom rooms” which are setups where a TV, cameras, mics, and a controller are used so that several people in a room can connect to other people either in their own rooms or singly. Not a great feature today, but pre-pandemic was convenient for multi-site meetings.

They also have a local deployment option, in which the the backend servers are local to the client site, instead of in the Zoom cloud someplace. This can be important for places where security is important, as the local host controls all of the data.

Zoom also makes it easy for people to connect. Any device, including a POTS phone, can join a meeting. There is no cost to join a call, only to host one, though they have free options for hosting.

Enough with the sales pitch. I’m sure there is other software that can do similar, but Zoom was popular in the corporate space prior to the pandemic. Of course companies used their existing teleconference software during the pandemic, instead of getting something new.

The thing I find interesting is that the term used for these remote video calls changed pre- and post-pandemic. We used to have Skype meetings over Zoom. Now I occasionally have Zoom calls with Google Meet. Also, Zoom is better to say than, “Can I Microsoft Teams you and the client tomorrow?”

As for quality, I tested Zoom, Google Meet, and Facetime, and Zoom had the best video quality based on my own personal opinion, not any objective measure. That might be due to superior software, or Zoom simply using a higher bit rate video stream, so more bandwidth, than the others.

10

Early on in quarantine, my gf’s first teleconference used Zoom because it was easy, quick, and dirty. They discussed how they’d be doing things and went from there, with Zoom used just that once. However, proceeding form there, they continued referring to their meetings as Zoom Meetings.

11

I think that this is a large part of it. Naming the product with a verb was pretty brilliant if it was intentional.

I actually prefer Teams though.

12

I never say I’m going to Zoom somebody. At work I say that I’m going to call somebody, and they know it will be with Teams. And with my parents I say I’m going to talk to them on Saturday and I send them a Zoom invitation.

I never used Zoom before April, when we started having German classes on Zoom. My friend had her 50th birthday party on Zoom, courtesy of her brother’s corporate account. After that I signed up for a Zoom account so I could talk to my parents with video. Haven’t paid for it.

13

My government agency doesn’t allow Zoom for security reasons, so our options are Webex and Teams. We’ve found Webex superior in terms of sound and video quality.

14

I first used Zoom about 4 or 5 years ago for online computer courses with kids, and I’m pretty sure the reason we used it was that from the point of view of the newbie, it couldn’t be easier to get onto. Here’s an email with a link, click the link. Done.

By contrast, I once spent all evening trying to figure out what fucking format my mother-in-law was supposed to enter her Skype login in so that she either was or wasn’t using her Windows Live account that she apparently created without knowing it while just trying to do a call on Skype (there was something about the string “live:” maybe having to be entered in some boxes, and not in others, or maybe you had to remember exactly how you set it up during the time you didn’t even realise you were making a Windows Live account … honestly, I’ve repressed the details, it was too horrible). One experience like that can really sour you on a platform.

I don’t think most of the platforms listed in the OP have ever been used much for socialising. Does anyone use GotoMeeting, Webex or Connect apart from corporate workers in their actual workplaces? We had Webex for parent teacher interviews (son’s school) this year, but that’s the only time I’ve ever used it … and it worked way less well than the Teams meetings my daughters’ school set up. That’s the only time in my live I’ve used either of those systems.

The videoconferencing world is still really fragmented, but it’s my perception that for social connection before 2020 it was Skype or FaceTime - Skype sucked, and FaceTime was platform-dependent. So there was an opportunity out there for one of the many many competitors to suddenly get insta-famous, and Zoom was what won.

15

At the school I work at, the generic verb we use is “stream”. Each teacher chooses on their own whether to use Zoom or Google Meets, but I think most of us have chosen Meets, because if you’re already using Google Classroom (which everyone is), Meets is even easier than Zoom to set up. As in, literally one click to set it up for the first time for a class, and then one click to join each day.

That said, though, Zoom still has a lot of features that Meet doesn’t, some of which led to a school-wide mandate to use Zoom rather than Meet for parent-teacher conferences.

16

Before the Pandemic I used WebEx for conference meetings and Skype to call my far-away kids. I’ve never figured out how to add more than one person to a Skype call, and it is like a phone in that if the called party isn’t there you’re out of luck. No waiting rooms.
I don’t know what WebEx costs, but when we started using it one of our board members worked for Cisco, so it was easy for him.
Zoom is far easier. WebEx changed their GUI to be more Zoom-like. I run Zoom meetings for a club where most people are retired and many are 80 and no one has a problem with Zoom. (Except when trying to use it from a desktop with no camera or microphone. )

I think a lot of the early Zoom bombing came from people publishing their meeting details on social media where they could be harvested. We’ve never had a problem.
Also, at the beginning of the Pandemic Zoom relaxed the time limit for its free version. By the time they put it back, people were hooked. And it is fairly cheap.

17

Mine too, and a lot of others as well. We dropped WebEx for Zoom in 2015.

18

So… how do they make money?

19

Zoom is the Netscape of the future.

20

This.

I’d never heard of Zoom before the pandemic. But I’ve used Webex, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, GotoMeeting, and Discord. And Zoom is easier to get your elderly relative to join the memorial service than any of the competition. And it’s free for everyone but the host.

I can’t tell you how many Webex presentations I’ve been to where the first 10 minutes were spent dealing with technical issues.
Skype and Teams require you to buy something, as best as I can tell. Anyway, I tried to invite my husband to a Teams call to test it before setting up an interview call. And it didn’t work smoothly. Discord and Hangouts are free, and work pretty well for small groups. But neither is as easy as Zoom, and neither works well for large groups, either.

Teams requires you to install a client. Teams is unintuitive. Teams only shows a maximum of… I forget, maybe 9 or 16 little pictures of people.

For calling my co-workers, who have all used it before and all have it installed, I prefer Teams, too. But I’m planning an on-line event, and I didn’t even consider Teams as an option. Far too many deal breakers.