The State of Videoconferencing at the End of 2025: Thirty Years In, Still Not Done
Thirty years is a long time. Let’s ask Mr. Peabody to set the Wayback Machine to 1995.
If you wanted to make a video call back then, you weren’t casually tapping a glass-covered rectangle in your hand. You were likely sitting in front of a PictureTel Concord, wrestling with frame relay, or doing what I did in my broadcasting days – pushing one-way video over satellite with return audio coming back separately. Videoconferencing was expensive, fragile, and very much a “set it up well in advance and do not touch anything once it’s working” experience.
Fast forward thirty years. We’ve lived through the rise and fall of TelePresence, ubiquitous broadband to homes, the consumerization of video via Skype – with its own rise and fall, a global pandemic that forced the world to learn how to unmute itself, and the normalization of video as a default communication tool. Videoconferencing today is cheaper, easier, and vastly more accessible than anything we could have imagined in the mid-90s.
And yet, here we are back in 2025, oddly stalled and increasingly out of vogue.
We’ve come incredibly far. But somewhere along the way, momentum shifted away from making video better and toward making it buzzier. The industry has decided that video is “mature,” which is often shorthand for “good enough,” and attention has wandered toward the shiny promise of AI. The result is a category that works most of the time, frustrates us more than it should, and feels like it’s waiting for someone to pick up the ball and start running again.
How Video Works When It’s Personal
On my last business trip, I wanted to show my wife the view from my hotel room. I didn’t think about platforms, licenses, bandwidth policies, or recording formats. I picked up my iPhone, called her iPhone on FaceTime, and it just worked. No scheduling. No testing. No friction.
That’s the bar people now expect for video. FaceTime, WhatsApp, and similar tools have taught users that video should be instant, intuitive, and painless. When individuals want to add video, they don’t tolerate ceremony.
When it’s – as the Don would say – not personal but business, video suddenly lives in a completely different universe. That’s where the major platforms come into play.
Zoom: Still the Gold Standard
Despite how unsettled its current messaging feels to me, Zoom still delivers the best overall video experience when quality matters, by far. The video holds up remarkably well at lower bandwidths. The ability to record both switched video and gallery views simultaneously remains unmatched. Recorded file quality is consistently superior, which is crucial if you plan to reuse recordings for podcasts, interviews, or edited content.
I rely on those recordings constantly. Zoom’s output is simply better than that of the other major platforms, and that remains true today. That’s precisely why its current strategic emphasis gives me pause.
None of this is to say that Zoom shouldn’t be investing in AI or exploring adjacent markets. Of course it should. Every major platform needs to evolve, and ignoring AI entirely would be irresponsible. The concern isn’t that Zoom is looking forward, but that attention appears to be shifting away from the very thing Zoom uniquely achieved – defining what modern video is, setting the bar others chased, and becoming the default verb people reach for when they say, “let’s do a video call.”
That kind of leadership isn’t just about having the best features in a given release cycle. It’s about owning the category itself. And that position, once loosened, is far harder to reclaim than it is to defend.
Which is why Zoom’s current strategic direction may make sense to other analysts, but feels like a real risk to core video champions like me. Rather than leaning harder into the fact that they rebuilt and dominated the modern video experience, Zoom seems intent on becoming a different kind of best solution in a much larger ocean, instead of continuing to fully own the pond they made their own. That’s an understandable ambition, but one that comes with real tradeoffs.
It’s a bit like a star quarterback deciding mid-season that he’d rather be an entire baseball team. (Remember “…Catching, Bugs Bunny; Left Field, Bugs Bunny; Right Field, Bugs Bunny; Third Base…” etc.?) Ambitious, sure. But it leaves the football team wondering why the thing it was already great at, and known for being great at, now feels less central.
Microsoft Teams: Ubiquitous, Powerful, and Still Weird Between Companies
Microsoft Teams, on the other hand, is almost certainly the most widely used professional video platform today. It began life as a bundled, lower-quality companion to other Microsoft tools (after many generations of predecessors), and it has closed the gap dramatically in both features and quality. Credit where it’s due, Microsoft moved fast and learned quickly.
It’s still not my first choice when I get to pick the platform, and I’ve been very direct with Microsoft about why.
The biggest issue remains reliability across enterprises. You never quite know what will happen when you cross organizational boundaries. Will the other company’s policies block your connection? Will file sharing work? Will you need to log out and join anonymously? Will something fail for no obvious reason?
Inside a single enterprise, Teams is formidable. Across enterprises, it’s inconsistent. Until Microsoft fully solves that inter-company experience, Teams will never be as ubiquitous as it could be.
The other issue, admittedly niche but very real for me, is recording quality. When the goal is to reuse video as content, Teams recordings simply don’t hold up as well as Zoom’s. Microsoft has come very far in a short period of time, so I suspect they will eventually resolve these issues – but they haven’t yet.
Google Meet: Balky, Improving, and Quietly Eating at the Edges
Google Meet is never my first choice, as finding the button to do something is like going on a safari without the binoculars and machete, but I’m generally capable when given that mission. Google has added enough features and quality improvements to make Meet viable in real enterprise environments. It sort of mostly does the job. Like I said, viable.
What’s interesting is that I’m seeing more organizations that live primarily in Google Workspace move from Zoom to Meet. Not because Meet is better – as viable alone certainly is not – but because it’s OK…and less expensive. That slow market share gain says less about Meet than it does about how Zoom’s current priorities are landing with core video users.
When the leader stops paying attention to its core users, the alternatives don’t have to be great. They just have to be …viable.
Cisco Webex: The Quietly Dangerous One
Cisco Webex has always been one of the most technically complete collaboration platforms on the market. Cisco’s problem has never been capability; it’s been perception and momentum. Webex – or WebEx, depending on the era – went through more than its share of band-aids as it folded into the Project Squared / Spark platform. While Webex lost a lot of ground to Zoom and Teams at the platform level, Cisco’s parallel focus on devices never really slowed down.
That focus is now paying dividends. Cisco is enjoying renewed attention thanks to the native interoperability baked into much of its hardware portfolio, and it’s increasingly clear that Webex is the software counterpart to that strategy, not a forgotten side project. Based on features I’ve seen emerging quietly within Cisco’s ecosystem (and peeked at in whisper suites), I wouldn’t be surprised to see Webex make meaningful strides in the near future. This is the platform people tend to underestimate right before it gets interesting again.
Mature Does Not Mean Finished
Yes, there are other players. Interoperability specialists. Calling platforms with video bolted on. An overpriced 3D option on the horizon about to repeat the rise and fall of TelePresence. But regardless of all those, in 2025, Zoom, Teams, Meet, and Webex remain the core four.
Regrettably, too many people involved in creating and supporting those platforms believe video collaboration is “done.” Anyone who uses them daily knows that can’t be true. The category isn’t finished, it’s just no longer fashionable to talk about improving layouts, reliability, cross-company experience, or recording quality when you can slap “Agentic AI” on a slide and call it innovation. And I’m still floored that none of the big four now touting their “awesome AI” capabilities are even trying to apply that intelligence to solve the decades-old platform interoperability problems – when everyone knows it could likely be addressed with a few hours of late-night coding by a junior developer fueled by Chicklets and bad coffee.
This feels a bit like the late seasons of a long-running TV show, when the writers assume the characters are fully developed and stop caring about story arcs. Trust me, the audience notices.
As the once and forever video guy, looking back at the last thirty years, my ask is simple. I hope at least one of these platforms decides that chasing AI hype isn’t the only path forward. I hope someone decides to double down on quality, reliability, ease of use, interoperability, and the fundamentals of human communication. Whoever does that won’t just improve videoconferencing. They’ll quietly win market share while everyone else is busy talking about the future instead of building it.