We had millions of dollars of Cisco/Tandberg hardware in our offices. They worked OK (Telepresence was actually quite good, but $$$$).

We trialed every viable competitor in the space that we could find. Blue Jeans and High Five were finalists and I can’t remember which one we were close to settling for. Then a large snowstorm had us working at home for a few days and the experience of just trying to have a small leadership team meeting was miserable.

We paused and trialed zoom. This was probably 2015 or so. It was immediately clear that the audio on zoom was superior. It still is, IMO. (I do about 2% Chime meetings; the audio processing there is an utter joke compared to Zoom, IMO.)

If you can make the core feature of audio work and make on-boarding smooth, you can win a large part of the market, which I think is exactly what happened.

Telepresence was incredible, but Cisco completely ruined it with the Tandberg acquisition. They restructured management to accommodate all the new execs from Norway, who just wanted to keep doing what they knew how to do: make more crappy commodity units. Surprise surprise, nobody wants a crappy commodity video chat, especially not a piece of hardware for $ when they could just use skype. Telepresence was best in class, but the Tandberg execs didn't "get it", divested attention into other (useless) areas, and ultimately completely fumbled the ball.

The real innovation Zoom brought to the table (IMHO) was not requiring you to make an account to join a call.

Inconsequential within a company where everyone already has a <whatever> account - but critical if it's a one-off or rare call - such as a vendor talking to a customer, a hiring manager inviting someone to interview, or a doctor calling a patient.

this, and the easy install process. it almost feels like installing malware.

Doesn't jitsi predate them?

I don't remember ever having to make a WebEx account to join.

I think people just jumped on the 'Zoom bandwagon' and assumed it was great, because everyone kept saying how great it was.

Zoom does just work - I've used hangouts/meet, skype, whereby/appear.in, discord, talky

Of all those Zoom had the best balance of stability/resource use/call joinability

I find meet a PITA to set up and invite random people

WebRTC browser chat is great for rooms >= 6 people and is my preferred choice

But zoom works pretty well from 1:1 up to 500:1 and is very easy to join

Don't get me wrong, I hate the Zoom client but when the target audience is everyone in your company, including your PC illiterate middle managers, then I can see how Zoom is quite good

I have to say, I've found both Google Meet and Discord to be more reliable in the "just works" department (despite neither being perfect). My experience with Zoom was a job interview where the link kept asking me to install a browser plugin, even though I already had, even if I clicked a link that was apparently a web fall back.

I think I had to use a phone dial in in the end

I wonder if you might have been sent a WebEx link? That doesn’t sound like Zoom.

AFAIK Zoom doesn’t use browser plugins but WebEx definitely does.

It's been 2.5 years, so can't verify, but almost certain it was Zoom. Possibly it was the desktop app it was asking me to install.

The problem with Discord is a lot of people can't figure out how to use it. It also requires sign up

I don't like zoom UI and graphical design but the application is relatively easy to get used to and its core (conferencing) works. And enough people started using it so people felt safe to invest time into it. I think That's what and why people like it.

What weird quirks? First time I joined a meeting I typed the code, clicked join with computer audio and everything worked. Where are the quirks?