Zoom

Zoom destroyed WebEx by being the video call that "just worked" without IT support, scaling from 10 million daily participants pre-pandemic to 300 million in April 2020. Its market cap briefly hit $159 billion, surpassing ExxonMobil's at that time. Eric Yuan, who left Cisco after they wouldn't fix WebEx, engineered a 40-minute free tier that monetized perfectly — long enough for useful meetings, short enough to drive upgrades. Zoom's reliability is 40% faster connection times than the average rival, making "You're on mute" the defining catchphrase of the remote-work era.