John Chambers' video vision: Shortsighted
Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers calls video "the killer app," but apparently, he hasn't been paying attention to trends on the Web, or even to his company's own emerging-collaboration story.
Video, while great, takes too long. We e-mail, instant-message, and tweet for a reason: it's short and to the point. Who has time to watch a video each them they want to communicate?
Perhaps even more critically, as Hampus Jakobsson pointed out to me (over Twitter, no less), video "requires full attention--the scarcest of all resources."
Cisco gets this. At least, groups within Cisco get this. That's why Cisco Senior Vice President Doug Dennerline's WebEx team has been adding presence and instant messaging through Jabber, e-mail through PostPath, and more to its Web-conferencing suite.
It's also why Cisco will almost certainly add some form of office productivity suite to WebEx, despite protestations to the contrary from Alex Hadden-Boyd, director of marketing for the collaboration software group at Cisco. (Apparently, Hadden-Boyd didn't see the memo from his boss, Dennerline.)
Zoho, anyone?
Zoho is a leading competitor to Google Apps and, in many areas, actually surpasses Google Apps. While some of Zoho's applications directly overlap with Cisco's current products, the sheer breadth (and, in some cases, depth) of its office productivity and collaboration story must be intriguing to acquisition-hungry Cisco.
Some suggest that Google will struggle to make it in the enterprise due to security concerns with Google Apps. Cisco doesn't have that problem. Its brand oozes "enterprise." As such, it may well be Cisco that changes the face of enterprise computing...by initially changing the way we communicate and collaborate within the enterprise.
Just don't hold your breath for video to part the waters. Video has its place, but it's a highly verbose form of communication, and the Web's most popular technologies increasingly teach us to speak sparingly.
Indeed, I think that we'll see Cisco acquire Control Yourself, the company behind open-source Twitter lookalike Identi.ca, before it changes the world through video.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Cisco touts video because they hope enterprises will pay good money to rip out their infrastructure and upgrade to new switches with Gigabit or 10G connections, and traffic prioritization capabilities to give priority treatment to video. The thing is, in any sensible company priority will be given to low-bandwidth transaction processing systems and other mission-critical apps, not frivolous video.
While Cisco has videoconferencing solutions, the focus seems to be on the 1:M of social networking, especially with the Flip acquisition, which is a big player in video sharing sites like Youtube. And quite honestly, for a networking company, that is where they should be focused. Except for the high-end vc solutions, bandwidth is very tightly managed in that vertical, but video sharing is on a very quick climb to HD quality and that burns bandwidth like no other product (except maybe torrents).
I agree that video as a 1:1 medium is still very immature and until it has the same ease of use as making a phone call, it will remain a niche communication medium.
Regardless, I'm like fazalmajid above. I will never watch a video of a speech, for example, if I can get the transcript. Video takes too long. It's too linear.
Video is great for sharing information, especially when there is other content to be shared at the same time, such as walking through a presentation. I've seen so many PowerPoint presentations that are really useless without the spoken words intended to go with them. So, sharing information in a form like YouTube is a great use of video.
Video for person-to-person meetings is also way better, depending on the type of meeting. Frankly, I think audio is better for some meetings. But, good quality video really does help enrich the experience. People don't seem so distant anymore. Personally, I think video is good for business relations.
Perhaps a last category for video is "video voicemail". Personally, I hate voicemail and would much rather read and respond to email. But, others are different and would prefer to voicemail. I've even known people who will receive a voicemail and then reply to the voicemail and send a response back to the sender. Talk about slow! But, they like it. Will video make that better? It might it it was all in my inbox right along with text email, Waves, or whatever is coming down the pike. I'll have to think about this category of video a bit more.
- by idfubar July 11, 2009 1:43 AM PDT
- Video is where the growth is; after all, how much of your time do you spend video-conferencing today and how much of your time do you think you'll spend video-conferencing ten years from now?
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