Spot on. I really wonder if all those people claiming "Zoom just works, unlike x" have really believed that the first time joining a meeting, or if they're just used to its weird UX quirks.
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.
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.
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 think I had to use a phone dial in in the end
AFAIK Zoom doesn’t use browser plugins but WebEx definitely does.