Not my experience. As I said, I've been doing this for well over 15 years with various tools. Zoom has a level of friction that matches other tools. You need to run an installer,fiddle with headsets, make sure your network doesn't suck, etc.
Zoom hit enormous growth in 2020. Before that, they were just yet another obscure video call tool thingy. I've used several of the long forgotten ones that existed before covid. Investors seemed to like investing in me-too applications. Zoom was one of them and was able to spend enough on marketing right when it was optimal to do so. They hit a perfect bubble of investment cash and a sudden, unexpected need for video call tools.
People imagine all sorts of technical advantages that it simply never had. It's just a web app around some generic off the shelf video communication technology that they definitely did not invent. That's why there were so many of these tools already long before Zoom existed. I know of several such companies that came and went in the Berlin area and talked to their teams. All you needed was some generic full stack coding skills and a couple of weeks to prototype together the off the shelf stuff. Some of the UIs I saw were actually pretty cool. Unlike Zoom, which I always thought was pretty generic and bland as a UX.
Even today, Webex, the closest thing to a standard that existed before Zoom became mainstream, sucks. The UX is shit, it's slow, has bugs like forgetting to turn off audio input after the call is over or having to turn on the camera to unmute, etc. It was a Java based app before, and it only worked on Windows (and at some later point in a limited capacity for mac).
Zoom has less friction, the installer just works on all platforms, and there are less noticeable bugs.
Zoom hit enormous growth in 2020. Before that, they were just yet another obscure video call tool thingy. I've used several of the long forgotten ones that existed before covid. Investors seemed to like investing in me-too applications. Zoom was one of them and was able to spend enough on marketing right when it was optimal to do so. They hit a perfect bubble of investment cash and a sudden, unexpected need for video call tools.
People imagine all sorts of technical advantages that it simply never had. It's just a web app around some generic off the shelf video communication technology that they definitely did not invent. That's why there were so many of these tools already long before Zoom existed. I know of several such companies that came and went in the Berlin area and talked to their teams. All you needed was some generic full stack coding skills and a couple of weeks to prototype together the off the shelf stuff. Some of the UIs I saw were actually pretty cool. Unlike Zoom, which I always thought was pretty generic and bland as a UX.