I vaguely remember Zoom back when the story about their clandestine web server came to light, but quickly forgot about it when they patched the bug.
Now that it's back in the news as one of the only companies who might financially benefit from COVID-19 (their stock is up significantly, last I checked), they seem to be everywhere.
I've seen some large news orgs using WebEx, but that's probably not new for them as they need something that's really enterprise-grade and won't go down on a whim.
To that end, why has Zoom caught on so much this time around? iOS has FaceTime and Android - at least Google variants - have Hangouts. They're system apps, and everybody already has credentials sorted out.
Does anyone know Zoom's relative marketshare before this hit?
I wouldn't use Hangouts even if I'd have to pay for it.
A lot of users went for this because they were already familiar with their meeting software ( over the last 5 years,I only had maybe one meeting that used Hangouts,the rest were always Zoom). I must admit it's more user friendly than MS Teams as well. In the end,it does work and does the job well enough without havit to train people for 5 hours on it. It's incredible how few companies manage to get it right on such a software.
My point about the built-in apps was there is no training required. These things do the basics, generally work without any fiddling, and are supported well beyond what an outside company can do, even if it's your core business.
Meh, maybe I'm just getting old in the my 30's and trying to use less software if I can help it.
Nit: "PC" as in Windows PC is weird, Linux exists too, before you even consider macOS.
Dial-in numbers!? Where we're going we don't need a conference "bridge" because there isn't really a server sitting in the middle between you and all the other people on the call.
What else do you need from them? :)
I understand being wary, that never hurts, but the company is doing good things and apologized and fixed it.