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• Zoom

  Zoom was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former Cisco WebEx engineer who left the company after growing frustrated that WebEx's aging technology couldn't keep pace with a rapidly changing video conferencing market, and he set out to build a simpler, more reliable alternative from scratch. The company grew steadily through the 2010s before experiencing extraordinary, unprecedented growth in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced widespread remote work and remote schooling, causing Zoom's daily meeting participants to increase from roughly 10 million to over 300 million within just a few months. Zoom's name became so closely associated with video calling during the pandemic that "to Zoom" briefly entered everyday vocabulary as a generic verb for video conferencing broadly, similar to how "Google" became synonymous with web searching, regardless of which specific platform someone actually used. Zoom's combination of founder Eric Yuan's frustration with his former employer's outdated technology and its extraordinary pandemic-driven growth has made it one of the most consequential technology companies to emerge from the 2020s remote-work era.

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• Google Meet

  Google Meet launched in its current form in 2017 as "Hangouts Meet," an enterprise-focused successor built from Google's earlier Hangouts video chat product, before Google rebranded it simply as Google Meet in 2020 and significantly expanded free access amid surging pandemic-era demand. The platform benefits from tight integration with Google Workspace, letting users launch video meetings directly from Google Calendar invites and Gmail with minimal setup, an integration advantage particularly valuable for schools and businesses already using Google's broader productivity suite. Google made Meet's premium features temporarily free to all users during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, a move specifically aimed at competing directly against Zoom's rapidly growing user base during that critical period of remote work and remote schooling adoption. Google Meet's combination of its deep Google Workspace calendar and email integration and its pandemic-era free access expansion has made it one of the most widely adopted video conferencing tools in both education and business settings.

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• Skype

  Skype was founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, the same entrepreneurs behind the earlier peer-to-peer file-sharing service Kazaa, and it became one of the first widely popular consumer applications offering free voice and video calls over the internet. Skype's early peer-to-peer technology architecture, routing call data directly between users' computers rather than through centralized company servers, was a genuinely novel approach at the time that helped the service scale efficiently to millions of simultaneous users worldwide. Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion, one of Microsoft's largest acquisitions at the time, and the company eventually shifted focus toward its newer Teams product for both business and consumer video calling, officially retiring the original Skype consumer app in 2025. Skype's combination of its pioneering peer-to-peer internet calling technology and its historic role as one of the first mainstream consumer video calling applications has made it one of the most foundational products in the history of internet communication.

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• Cisco Webex

  Webex was founded in 1995 as a web conferencing startup before being acquired by networking giant Cisco Systems in 2007 for approximately $3.2 billion, becoming Cisco's flagship enterprise video and web conferencing product under the Webex brand. The platform built a long-standing reputation specifically within large enterprise and corporate IT environments, often integrated closely with Cisco's broader networking and telephony hardware infrastructure that many large companies already relied on for internal communications. Webex faced significant competitive pressure during the 2020 pandemic video conferencing boom, losing meaningful market share to newer, more consumer-friendly competitors like Zoom, prompting Cisco to invest heavily in redesigning and modernizing the Webex platform and interface in subsequent years. Cisco Webex's combination of its status as one of the earliest web conferencing platforms ever created and its deep integration within Cisco's broader enterprise networking ecosystem has made it one of the most historically significant video conferencing tools in corporate technology.

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• FaceTime

  FaceTime was introduced by Apple in 2010 alongside the launch of the iPhone 4, which was the first iPhone to include a front-facing camera specifically enabling the video calling feature, and it became one of the earliest mainstream mobile-native video calling applications. The service comes pre-installed on every Apple device, including iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers, giving it guaranteed built-in distribution across Apple's entire device ecosystem without requiring a separate app download, a significant advantage among Apple's own user base specifically. Apple later expanded FaceTime with a web-based link-sharing feature in 2021, allowing non-Apple device users on Android and Windows to join FaceTime calls through a browser for the first time, a notable shift from the platform's original Apple-exclusive design. FaceTime's combination of its historic role introducing mainstream mobile video calling alongside the original front-camera iPhone 4 and its guaranteed pre-installed presence across every Apple device has made it one of the most widely used video calling tools among consumers.

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More in Technology

• GoPro

  GoPro was founded in 2002 by Nick Woodman, who developed the original waterproof action camera specifically to help himself and fellow surfers capture footage of their own surfing without needing a separate camera operator, reportedly funding the company's early development partly by selling shell bead belts and macrame products out of his car. The company's compact, rugged, wearable camera design created an entirely new consumer camera category focused specifically on capturing first-person action sports and adventure footage, a use case traditional camera manufacturers hadn't significantly addressed before GoPro's emergence. GoPro's cameras became closely associated with extreme sports culture and user-generated content on platforms like YouTube, and the company built significant brand visibility through sponsorship of action sports athletes and events, positioning GoPro footage as central to how extreme sports content was captured and shared online. GoPro's combination of its founder's personal surfing-camera origin story and its creation of an entirely new action camera product category has made it one of the most distinctively positioned camera brands in the modern consumer electronics industry.

• Leica

  Leica traces its origins to Ernst Leitz's optical company in Wetzlar, Germany, and the company's engineer Oskar Barnack developed the original Leica camera in the early 1910s, one of the first cameras to use compact 35mm film, a format that became the dominant standard across the entire photography industry for the rest of the 20th century. Leica's cameras became closely associated with significant photojournalism throughout the 20th century, and photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson favored Leica's compact, quiet rangefinder cameras specifically for their ability to capture candid, unobtrusive street photography without drawing the subject's attention. The company has maintained an unusually premium market positioning throughout its history, with Leica cameras and lenses typically priced significantly above comparable competitors, a positioning built around the brand's reputation for exceptional optical quality and precise German manufacturing. Leica's combination of its foundational role establishing the 35mm film format as an industry standard and its sustained premium positioning built around photojournalistic heritage has made it one of the most historically significant and prestigious camera brands in photography history.

• Fujifilm

  Fujifilm was founded in 1934 in Japan, initially as a photographic film manufacturer, and the company built decades of expertise in color science and film emulsion technology before that same technical foundation informed its later digital camera development, particularly its distinctive film-simulation digital color profiles. The company's X series mirrorless cameras, launched starting in 2011, built a particularly devoted following among enthusiast and professional photographers specifically for their retro-styled physical dial controls and Fujifilm's film-simulation modes, which digitally recreate the distinctive color rendering of the company's classic film stocks. Fujifilm notably survived the digital photography transition that drove several competing traditional film companies, including Kodak, into serious financial decline or bankruptcy, successfully pivoting its film-era chemical and imaging expertise into new digital photography and even cosmetics and pharmaceutical business lines. Fujifilm's combination of its film-heritage-derived color science expertise and its successful survival and reinvention through the digital photography transition has made it one of the most distinctively positioned camera brands in the modern imaging industry.

• Sony

  Sony entered the camera market more significantly with its Cyber-shot digital compact camera line in the 1990s before making a much larger strategic push into the professional and enthusiast market with the acquisition of Konica Minolta's camera business in 2006, gaining that company's lens mount technology and camera expertise. Sony's Alpha mirrorless camera line, and particularly its full-frame A7 series launched in 2013, became widely credited with driving the broader camera industry's significant shift away from traditional DSLR designs toward mirrorless camera technology, which eliminates the internal mirror mechanism DSLRs rely on. The company's aggressive investment in mirrorless technology let Sony rapidly gain significant market share against the much longer-established Canon and Nikon, and by the 2020s Sony had become one of the top camera manufacturers by full-frame camera sales specifically, a remarkable rise for a relatively recent entrant into serious professional photography equipment. Sony's combination of its Konica Minolta acquisition and its industry-reshaping mirrorless camera technology push has made it one of the most disruptive and rapidly ascendant camera brands in the modern photography industry.

• Nikon

  Nikon was founded in 1917 in Tokyo, and the company's cameras gained significant international recognition after American photojournalist David Douglas Duncan used Nikon lenses on his cameras while covering the Korean War, demonstrating their optical quality to a global photojournalism audience for the first time. The company's F-mount lens system, introduced in 1959 with the original Nikon F camera, remained in continuous production with backward compatibility for more than 60 years, an unusually long-lived lens mount standard within an industry where competitors have more frequently redesigned their mount systems. Nikon built a particularly strong reputation among professional photojournalists and nature photographers throughout the film and early digital eras, and the company's rivalry with Canon for dominance of the professional camera market became one of the most closely followed brand rivalries within the photography industry. Nikon's combination of its Korean War-era international breakthrough and its unusually long-running F-mount lens compatibility has made it one of the most historically significant camera brands in professional photography.