This story was originally published on Aug. 15, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series.
I've been covering video conferencing (now often called "telepresence") products since the late 80s and saw my first offering in the mid-60s as a child at Disneyland. Over the years, product wave after product wave has come to market with the promise of the next big thing in telecommunications only to fail to meet even reasonable expectations for deployment in a market where users are measured in billions.
Andy Grove, one of the smartest people I've ever met, referred to Intel's (Nasdaq: INTC) axed video conferencing effort as his biggest mistake while running that company. We have laptops, tablets and, most recently, smartphones capable of video conferencing, but only a tiny percentage use them for it, and even fewer do so regularly. It isn't technology, availability or cost that is the problem -- it is people, and I'd like to explore that this week.
I was briefed on what may be the best video conferencing system in the world recently -- a product called Vidyo, which got me thinking about this. So, with some irony, it will be my product of the week.
A Brief History
AT&T (NYSE: T) first showcased video conferencing in the middle of the last century. It was incredibly impractical because networks weren't yet digital, but you could walk into a booth at Disneyland and talk to someone in another booth and see that person on a camera. Granted, since the booths were next to each other it wasn't that stunning as a communications technology, but everyone seemed to agree it was the near-term future. It was crafted into Disney's (NYSE: DIS) home of the future and written into the "The Jetsons" (predecessor to "Futurama").
Jump ahead to the late 80s, when there was a wave of room conferencing system companies. They proliferated like rabbits during the 90s and then largely vanished into Polycom by the beginning of this century. The promise of saved travel expenses was replaced by the image of little-used rooms full of largely nonfunctioning hardware that was never used (and to my recollection rarely dusted).
Last decade, we saw the birth of HD video conferencing systems because hardware makers figured that the problem was that we couldn't see each other clearly enough. They did address some of the more troubling aspects -- like the fact it took a near graduate degree to operate some of the older systems -- but one known problem remained.
The systems largely wouldn't interoperate. This interoperability issue kept them from being used for anything but in-company meetings -- and given the good ones cost upwards of half a million dollars, this meant that small remote offices and home workers (Jerry Seinfeld had one) generally couldn't afford them.
The systems were used more, but video conferencing didn't even look like it was getting close to critical mass. This year HP (NYSE: HPQ) -- which had one of the best systems -- exited the market. It sold its solution to Polycom, which has kind of become the great video conferencing system graveyard.
The big problem that no one seems to want to address is that we generally don't like conversing for long looking someone else in the eye. Try this: Sit across a table and look right at someone for an extended period of time while working with them. We had an exercise in college that put students together this way to emphasize human interaction. Generally, particularly for guys, this is not only uncomfortable, but also leads to confrontational behavior. It is OK for a few minutes -- but for longer meetings, you have this increasing feeling of discomfort.
I think this response can be unlearned, but I also think this is why people generally need to be forced to use these systems.
Some Success
The real test is whether people just use these systems naturally when given the choice, and most don't. Even though airline travel is anything but fun these days, it is generally preferable to using a video conferencing room based on employee behavior. How companies get folks to use the system is to restrict air travel and force the rooms as the only option for in-face meetings that otherwise would involve travel.
The clue that most seem to have missed is that people generally have to be forced to use the systems, and that wasn't the case with phones or audio conference room systems. It isn't that people don't want to talk to each other -- it is that they don't like to stare at each other for long periods of time.
More Problems
Over the years, other problems have become evident as well. The folks who are remote have the greatest affinity for a video solution, but what they need is to feel they can see into a meeting without being a head on a screen where folks focus their attention.
In short, they want to feel like they are part of the meeting but not the presentation themselves. Desktop users worry that executives are using desktop video systems to watch them in secret, and women generally feel very uncomfortable that someone can see their face before they've had a chance to check their makeup.
Oh, I'm not making this up -- we did a ton of surveys over a period of about 10 years as to why this stuff wasn't being used, and these are the things that came up.
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