Video calls have been with us for a while. Except, they were rarely used. IME, people sometimes had Skype calls with relatives abroad and that's about it. And then, COVID happened. Suddenly, Zoom skyrocketed, with Google Meet not far behind. The reason is obvious.
Now, the time of lockdowns and restrictions on gatherings is over, the incentives to do video calls are (AFAICT) more or less the same as pre-COVID, and yet video calls persist. They became a completely routine way of doing business meetings, academic seminars and occasional social events. Why? AFAICT it's just the initial adoption barrier: once everyone did lots of video calls, and realized they are actually pretty convenient, they just kept using them.
So, here's a fun question: What other things are like video calls in the pre-COVID era? That is, the technology exists (more or less: maybe the UX needs some trivial improvements), the use-cases exist, only nobody uses it just because they're unaware or because it's not a "normal" thing everyone does. Given something to create initial adoption (like COVID did for video calls), everyone would start using it and never go back.
I upvoted for karma but downvoted for agreement. Regarding Zoom, the reasons I had not used it more extensively before COVID were:
1. Tech related: from experience with Skype in the early days of video conferencing when broadband internet was just starting to roll out, video conferencing could be finnicky to get to work. Latency, buffering, dropped connections, taking minutes to start a skype call (usually I would call relatives on my regular phone first to get the Skype call set up, and then we'd hang up our regular phones once the video call was started. Early video calls were not a straight-up improvement on audio calls, but had benefits and drawbacks and had a narrow use-case for when you specifically wanted to see the grandkids' faces on the other side of the country or something.
I don't think this was necessarily Skype's fault. It was more the fault of poor internet connections and unfamiliarity with the tech. But in any case, my preconception about Zoom circa 2019, even despite widespread broadband internet, was that it would be the same sort of hassle to set up meetings. I remember being blown away when my first Zoom calls just worked effortlessly. Possibly an example of premature roll-out of a tech before it is technically mature leading to counter-productive results? This would kind of be like, if you fiddled around with GPT-1, got the impression that LLM chatbots were "meh," and then forgot about or mentally discounted the tech until GPT-5.
2. Social/cultural related: as a history instructor, my preconceptions about scheduling video calls, or doing lectures over video calls, was that students would simply not attend or would not pay attention, and thus video calls would not be a suitable replacement for in-person meetings and lectures. While I still don't think video calls get you 100% of the way there towards replacing the in-person experience (students definitely do goof-off or ghost during video lectures way more than in-person, I think it is more like 80% rather than the 50% or so that I had assumed before being forced to try it out on a mass scale during COVID.