I'm still not 100% clear on what zoom solved that led to such a surge in popularity. I'd used WebEx and other tools for work for years and they always seem "good enough". I probably prefer Zoom, but am not sure it improved life _that_ much...
Oh, everything popular before Zoom sucked so bad. Getting on a call was incredibly complicated, getting someone else in a call even more so. I got deflated whenever I saw a WebEx mail.
There were alternatives... But Skype was getting worse by the day, moving from decentralized to MS servers for all calls, and support for everything besides MS and the official App was also non-existant.
Google Calls/Hangouts/Meet/? was mistrusted by all MS shops (and still is)
Teams was nowhere it is right now beginning of the pandemic, and required buying into the Ecosystem.
In fact, Zoom was a (!) low entry, mostly platform-independent solution that was easy to set up if you had nothing to start from. And joining a call was not asking much from customers, students, business partners, etc.
All the competitors learned a lot from Zoom and we take these things for granted now.
There were other solutions of course, but sometimes you're lucky, and ads help.
I literally don't think I ever had an issue getting on a WebEx call, using it many times a week every week for as many years as I can remember. Not that I'm passionate about WebEx, it just so happens to be the tool we used before we used Zoom.
I don't think it had anything to do with familiarity to be honest - you noted that "Getting on a call was incredibly complicated, getting someone else in a call even more so." I suspect you overstated this point and, anecdotally, my experience was quite different to your own. I met with colleagues ranging from the technically proficient to technically incompetent and never had an issue. I'm not trying to repudiate your own experiences, just that I don't think things were so bad before Zoom that video conferencing was consistently awful
Edit: Hope that didn't sound argumentative - was not my intention
I also think in an (enterprise) company context, the sum of all those little things matters more. Corporates need out of the box integrations and processes, built-in auditing etc., and it seems that Zoom catered to those needs well.
It made video calls more accessible. They used mobile first approach so it was more accessible to lot of people. WebEx was a pain the ass use on desktop and it still is. Eric Yuan begged Cisco to invest more in WebEx and got frustrated and left and built Zoom.
Yeah, me neither. In my enterprise, we already had Teams in place (via o365). After Zoom's surge in popularity, we still have Teams in place, but now we're spending money on both Zoom and Teams. I doubt this is due to vendor redundancy because it would be the only enterprise service with this feature. I personally prefer Teams because I always have Teams open, it integrates better with Outlook and it's more or less included with o365. I guess it's a different story if you didn't already have a solution in place...
In my personal life, um... video chat with many people is not really a part of it. I just used Google Duo/Meet when needed.
anecdotally, zoom succeeded by being a neutral third party with a name that's fun to say.
if your company is on microsoft and you want to arrange a meeting with people at a company that uses google apps, you have to decide on which company's video call platform to use. and inevitably, if your company's video call platform is used you'll have to help the people at the other company figure out how to use your platform, and you'll have to apologize for any connection issues. so the best solution was to use a new app that wasn't the one any party in the meeting used.
Thinking back, Zoom had optimized its codec to provide lower latency than WebEx. The lower latency caused a noticeable improvement in user experience. Combine that with the SMB-oriented pricing model that had a free tier and I think that’s all they really needed.
