
Ask HN: Why Did WebEx Lose? - ijidak
With COVID-19, it seems like all of America is talking about zoom.<p>Yet, when you read the search snippets for Zoom and WebEx, they both claim to be the &quot;leading Enterprise solution&quot; for video conferencing.<p>However, it seems clear that Zoom is the real winner.<p>And WebEx is at best a irrelevant second. The Bing to Zoom&#x27;s Google.<p>But, when I was in college from &#x27;99-&#x27;03 WebEx was the first mover and clear leader.<p>I don&#x27;t remember WebEx being terrible.<p>And from my memory they work almost the same.<p>Any take on what happened? And lessons for entrepreneurs?
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codegeek
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.

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apohn
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.

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ijidak
Interesting. I see. This helps.

I haven't looked at market share numbers.

Just observing mindshare.

But this is good to know.

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lucozade
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...](https://www.statista.com/statistics/870061/united-states-top-web-
conferencing-technologies-market-share/)

~~~
ijidak
I see. I'm going more off of mindshare during this whole Coronavirus pandemic.

I only hear zoom mentioned in the media and in social media.

Organizations that are just now adopting seem to be defaulting to Zoom. All
anecdata, I admit.

But, at the same time, it seems there are enough data points across the media
outlets and social channels, to see a trend.

I'm surprised at the shift in mindshare. Given that I remember a time when
WebEx was videoconferencing.

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siruncledrew
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.

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runawaybottle
It’s probably synonymous with enterprise video conferencing. A startup or your
kid’s teacher isn’t going to reach for WebEx. It’s totally still around in
large companies. It mostly does the job but fails about 3% of the time for no
good reason. Screen sharing mostly sucks, but I haven’t used Zoom, so can’t
compare.

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_ah
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.

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amai
The cool kid on the block is [https://jitsi.org/jitsi-
meet/](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](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22708233)

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Spooky23
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!

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

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2rsf
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.

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mixmastamyk
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.

