Why Did WebEx Lose?

Webex did not lose. They just serve a different audience (mostly B2B I would say). Zoom has done a good job at going after the usual B2C customers so they are more popular but webex is a beast and is not going anywhere yet.

Situations like these, zoom is easier and cheaper to start with and hence barrier to entry is low. They also have done a better job at advertising to the consumers.

Anecdotal evidence - I work for a very large enterprise company and have a lot of meetings with customers and partners. The company I work for sells software to a lot of software and non-software companies. Most of these customers are large (5000+ employees) established companies.

Over the last two years: Vast majority of conferences with Skype and WebEx. Maybe one or two of our small partners use Zoom.

Where are you getting your data from?

This [1] would suggest that the Google/Bing analogy is a little off.

My, anecdotal, experience is that some large corporations, who would like to use Zoom, can't until the major security issues are resolved.

I think it's very possible that Zoom will end up as the dominant player but I see no evidence that it's there yet.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/870061/united-states-top...

Or in Webex’s perspective this is probably a huge boom compared to normal.

Zoom is the cool new kid on the block - and actually managed to jettison itself above Google Hangouts. Like how Slack disrupted Hipchat and Linq.

I think where Webex lost its edge is that it became too enterprise-y and reluctant to innovate the product and user experience in favor of maintaining predictability for IT admins and being grandfathered through SaaS initiatives at big companies that would rather pay up for what has worked than change everything for something better.

WebEx fell way behind in usability. I consistently had problems getting audio to work as recently as a year ago. Regardless of whether I used the browser experience or their installed app, the only reliable way was to join the conference by computer and then use a phone to separately join the audio stream.

A very large corp I know still uses WebEx, but generally only uses it for screen sharing and has a completely different phone conferencing system they use for side-channel audio.

That's not how you win a market.

The cool kid on the block is https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/ . At least they don't share their user data with facebook like Zoom: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708233

Cisco happened. They really suck and bought the product to slow adoption.

They prioritized integration with Cisco VoIP and $25k TVs with Cisco stickers and cameras over features that people give a hoot about.

Why? It’s pretty obvious that a well executed solution like Zoom or even Google leads to a conclusion — you don’t need video equipment that costs as much as your car or phones that cost more than an iPad!

If I had to guess? WebEx is used by every big company, so Cisco rested on their laurels.

Check your numbers first, "talking about" is not the same as actually being more used. The big enterprise I work for, and a couple I know of, use Skype/Teams and discourage the use of Zoom and other free alternatives.

We use webex at work, they probably pay a lot of money for the service, and it has been reliable enough.

Meanwhile, Zoom has a lot of press, and a lot of freeloaders. We shall see how that turns into profit in the future.