I think it's region and connection speed dependent, but for several years I noticed that meetings with zoom had wayyyy less problems with freezes, bad quality, audio drops and stuff when compared to all other tools.

Our company read.ai builds add-ons for videocon clients so I'm pretty familiar with most clients.

- Zoom is just simply the best in terms of stability, performance, user experience, and in particular ease-of-first-use. Call quality is the best.

- Webex is a hot mess. They've been scrambling to catch up and have made stride but have a ways to go. Install is a nightmare

- google meet feels like it's barely changed in 5 years. Makes my fans take off. Decently stable at least

- Teams is decent all-around, featureful, and actually had a good SDK before Zoom, but install/userex and stability struggle at times

- is skype even a thing still?

Hands down the two biggest factors are time-until-first-use, friction, and stability of the audiovideo stream. Zoom simply dunked on the other legacy players in this regard.

Webex got better under pressure from others but it's what we used at first and the CEO of my mid size employer got talked into zoom near the beginning of covid and it was just very easy to use and much less problematic than webex which we used before but didn't need nearly as much so we put up with its faults. Then covid hit and zoom just worked better despite the encryption debacle.

It was free and easy to get started with, and worked.

I've assumed that control over the end point client native software allows them to focus on removing pain points. Codecs. NAT traversal etc.

Once a critical mass of users, big corporates etc. found their solution easier, then they got the network effect.

The first year of covid webex wasn’t really innovating while Zoom was flinging out new features. WebEx is now going faster and adding more and more features.