By KIM BELLARD

A year ago, if you’d used or even heard about Zoom, you were probably in the tech industry.  Today, if you haven’t used Zoom, your friends or colleagues must not like you very much.  COVID-19 has made most of us homebound most of the time, and video services like Zoom are helping make that more bearable.

And, thankfully, healthcare is finally paying attention.

Zoom was founded in 2011, poking along under the radar for several years, overshadowed by competitors like Skype or WebEx.  For the entire month of May 2013 it only had a million meeting participants.  Even by December 2019 it could boast “only” 10 million daily users.

Then — boom — COVID-19 hits and people start staying at home.  Daily users skyrocketed to 200 million in March and as many as 300 million in April (well, not quite).  Daily downloads went from 56,000 in January 2020 to over 2 million in April.  Zoom is now used by businesses and families alike, drawn by its simplicity and ease of use.  

By all rights, we should be using WebEx for business video calls and Skype for personal ones.  Both had been around longer, offered credible services, and still exist.  But both were acquired along the way, WebEx by Cisco, and Skype ultimately by Microsoft.  As with its acquisition of Nokia, once acquired Microsoft didn’t quite seem to know what to do with it.  Each left openings that Zoom plunged through when the pandemic hit.