One some days, you can set a clock by how long Skype takes to flake out: “It’s pushing 20 minutes, so expect me to restart the call if it dies.”Įven the most expensive business-class services with the best supporting infrastructure can’t overcome local network problems. The consumer service Skype can sometimes do a great job of both audio and video, but its quality varies from day to day and even over the course of a call, often to the point where it’s unusable. (I know of one case where moans and shrieks during a conference call got an unmarried couple in a remote office fired, and another case where one side’s position in a price negotiation for a large contract was given to the other side.) But I digress. Sometimes people who think they are muted are not, and they inadvertently transmit inappropriate sounds to horrified listeners, or they transmit information that was supposed to be secret to delighted listeners. I won’t even mention the people who call in on cellphones from their cars while driving or those who use substandard speakerphones. Sometimes people generate feedback or echoes whenever their microphones are on sometimes barking dogs or meowing cats interrupt the meeting. Sometimes the telephone bridge and the computer audio don’t mix properly. Some people can only get on the call using a telephone others can only get on using their computers. Some people can’t get on the call at all, while others can hear audio but not see video, and still others can hear and see but can’t be heard or seen, though they have microphones and video cameras. Web conference calls are notoriously prone to problems. There is also variation in the geographic coverage of vendors’ telephone points of presence (that is, global call-in numbers), although telephony infrastructure is becoming less important as more users call in from their computers (using microphones and speakers) or mobile devices.

They are also expected to handle large conference broadcasts, either in the base service or as a separate product.Īs we will see, there is a bit of variation among the business-grade products in all of these areas, as well as some differences in their bundling strategies and their behavior in restricted-bandwidth situations. They integrate with common desktop software, and they work with mobile devices. These higher-end products are expected to simultaneously display desktop shares, video, and audio. While these can be useful, they don’t quite meet the criteria for business-grade Web conferencing products. Microsoft Skype, Google Hangouts, and Google Voice (no video) are three I've used extensively. Some businesses use consumer products for voice and video over the Internet. (They hate it when I leave them out they really hate it when I tear their product to shreds.) Of course, I’m leaving a few out, in at least one case as a kindness to the vendor. Other products in the field include Adobe Connect, Drum ShareAnywhere,, and Zoom. The two leaders in business Web conferencing are Cisco WebEx and Citrix GoToMeeting. Today I'd add video over Internet, which has become more and more prevalent as bandwidth has improved. In Friedman's view, VoIP, file sharing, and wireless were the 'steroids' that have accelerated the flattening of global commerce. Thomas Friedman famously announced that the world is flat in his 2005 book of that name he was writing about globalization.

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