[cataflam]

> I find it fascinating how committed everyone now is to Zoom when, at least in my circle, almost nobody had used it before two weeks ago.

Anecdotally, almost every startup/VC/etc. in my circle has been using Zoom for the past 2+ years (Paris and London). So there was probably a seed ready to take root not far from you. I've had the occasional Hangouts, and the rare WebEx or Teams meeting with some larger orgs, but that's it. I haven't even logged in to Skype in that time period.

Even my parents have been able to use zoom seamlessly from their phones. I think it helps that you don't even have to login or have an account if it's always someone else creating the meetings.

Zoom was not the first mover in chat/video apps, far from it. But over the past few years, it has overtaken all the other, older ones for the early adopters in the technology adoption cycle, at least in my anecdotal experience. The last few weeks have accelerated the mass adoption that could have taken much longer or never happened to an instant.

[wyattpeak]

I'm sure, I gathered from the uptake that it wasn't new. My point wasn't about being a first mover (although I compared to the that), but about being the first to be taken up. How people's attitudes towards that initial hurdle of getting a system set up change extremely quickly.

It was easy to convince everyone to install Zoom two weeks ago, now I don't believe I could convince them to install anything else to replace it.

While Zoom may have overtaken others over a couple of years due to being a better system or what have you, that had no impact on my friends and colleagues who hadn't used it or others to come to an informed opinion on the matter.

[troebr]

At my company we've used for a few years each: Hangout, Bluejeans, and Zoom. We got acquired so now we're also using Skype and Teams alongside Zoom. Zoom didn't really invent anything groundbreaking, they did the same thing but with a better execution, it's more pleasant to use.

Similarly, we used Hipchat before Slack, and now we have Teams and Slack. Slack serves the same purpose, but it's more pleasant to use than the other two.

Neither Slack nor Zoom were groundbreaking products, and they had significant competition. They both do the same thing as their competitors, and you could argue the difference isn't crazy, but the user experience improvements are enough to justify switching products.

I guess I'm just confirming that I had a similar experience to yours.