[Ocha]

Well, google was busy only supporting chrome browser for hangouts (yes you could have video in FF but it wouldn’t support blurring or any other advanced features it did in chrome), and Microsoft kept failing with Skype for Business.

End of day, when you needed an app for video conferencing that worked for everyone, your choice was mostly zoom.

And now we are here

[palata]

That's another question: when did blurring become a thing? It mostly sucks, and it feel like it's not that hard to make sure that you are fine with what's in your back... If you are not, just don't enable the video, right?

[TrevorJ]

Lots of people ended up suddenly working from home with little to no warning and had to make do with whatever home environment they had available, whether they had a home office or not. The simplest, least intrusive professional option was to use blur.

[sneak]

A lot of people are required to enable video to keep their job.

[twelve40]

true, I worked at a place that was super-anal about always having video on all the time. Funny enough, bigger companies I worked at often don't care. But it's probably good for "visibility" anyway.