From what I remember, when remote working during the pandemic first started due to lockdowns, Zoom blew up because it was quite literally one click and you're in a call.

The initial installer would do some funky stuff in the ground I believe to bypass a lot of the usual install friction. Once it was discovered, Zoom's installation process became a little bit slower.

Next, calls were being "broken into" because there was no security so they changed the default behaviour to generate a password randomly. As a user, this meant having to go through the normal install process and then enter all this stuff in so it seemingly went from near-instant (10 seconds top from no install to in a call) through to perhaps like 5 minutes once you fiddle with macOS's permission model (that was bypassed I presume) and all that.

Personally, I hate it nowadays and it's banned on our company devices anyway but I think for plenty of users, they bought into it when it was frictionless and have no reason to change.

I think there was an element of shadow IT going on like marketing people for example using it for calls without necessarily getting sign off or oversight from IT teams, given it was "free". That's purely anecdotal mind you.

I tried all the familiar offers at the beginning of the pandemic. Zoom was the only one at the time that offered a smooth connection regardless of the other person's internet speed for decently sized groups. Also their creepy hacks that open their so or the installer were universally panned on HN (for good reason) but it was the only way I could talk to my more senior members of my family without being on a forty minute phone call walking them through every step of the other companies' offerings

I've seen product updates from LINE touting their improvements and I assume the Skype team got yelled at for blowing it so bad at the beginning but there's just no inertia for anyone to bother with something else until after the pandemics over. I've stopped looking. The company seems shady but I'll take a product that works to be able to actually talk to friends and family in the short term.

Zoom takes care of customers with very heterogenous device/network conditions, which makes it reliable solution:

(1) Zoom works even in pretty bad network environment, and provides phone call fallback out of box; (2) Zoom provides a variety of clients optimized for many platform and devices.

If there are 10 people in a meeting, even 1 people facing technical issues can affect other 9 people, which is very different from typical software that can just ignore 10% customers without losing 90% customers.

Because it works really well (at least from my experience and others I've heard). It has a solid (and really useful) feature set, and I generally have lower latency and less CPU usage than any other video conferencing system I've tried.

In our team at our university we evaluated all of the common products in March and Zoom offered the best features, reliability, and ease of use.

What other software allows a large number of people to meet, has good audio and image quality even when many people are connected, has easy switching between fullscreen, windowed mode and screen sharing, allows you to re-arrange the participant videos on screen, allows you to share documents by drag & drop, allows you to raise a hand in the participant list, is easy to install and works on all platforms, allows connecting via an ID/link and an optional password, allows the presenter to see all participants while sharing the screen, allows the host to mute participants, has good auto-feedback suppression, and allows the host to transfer host authority to any other user and to optionally control who is entering?

All of these features are essential for us. Is there something else that has all these features?

The one thing I never got, was how video beat conf calls. I mean, yeah, I do get it on one hand. On the other hand, so, I am so used to conf calls, with their own pitfalls, that I never saw the added value of needing more bandwidth to see bad images of the other people in the call.

It all new, Zoom actually is one of the pioneers.