Among all the current collaboration services available for us to get things done, phone is still the best for the world at large. Phone offers the best service due to:
1. Simple, standard user interface for ALL the end-points.
2. Well understood addressing for every end-point. (10 digit in North America)
3. Works all the time, i.e. meets the customer expectations.
The worlds largest businesses (AT&T, Verizon, ....BT, Telefonica, FT, Deutsche Telecom, KPN...VSNL,...NTT,...China Telecom...) are built by offering the phone service. Just in North America, the current total revenues for the carriers is in excess of $250B/- for calendar year 2006. The telecommunications giants have built their SS7 networks with the SLA's required and inter-operate. The user interface to using the telephone system has not changed, but the underlying technology, platform, service have all matured over several decades. In addition several creative marketing plans to sell the service minutes came and went.
However, in the last two decades we have seen the advent of 3 major innovations that are disrupting the communications business world-wide.
1. Computer as the end-point for collaboration.
2. IP Networks as the transport for data, voice and video.
3. Internet, the first open network for the planet.
In the next article, I will cover the array of collaboration technologies invented with the computer as end-point.
Sep 21, 2006
Phone is the best.
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3 comments:
I agree that phone has been one of the best, most simple, elegant in terms of usability, learnability, utility and other benefits.
However, as you are leading your thoughts into the topic of collaboration with computer as an end-point, this is definitely the trend with a lot of white-collared and knowledge workers spending most of their time near or infront of a computer. In office these days, the deskphone is rarely used to communicate with colleagues. But this is not true when communicating with outside the enterprise people.
But here is where the real promise and potential that RTC holds. It is supposed to make it as simple by enabling the communication transparent of the channel of communication. But I still find user's first decision (if we do a task analysis) is to decide on the channel on communication and then act. That amount of an integrated, seamless, cross-device, cross-channe l RTC is not happening and unless that happens, RTC in my opinion ceases to be RTC and remains to either IM or Web conf. or phone etc. i.e. individual channels of RTC.
What do you guys think?
I think the real question is about the relevance of RTC as opposed to individual channels of RTC.
Shankar
From a knowledge worker perspective computer and the context of the conversations are very important. All Enterprise S/W vendors are marching along this path by integrating all the channels and embedding collaboration with applications. These solutions are clearly becoming very complex and are a boom for System Integrators.
From an Internet/ Web perspective, keeping things simple is the best way......and there will be >1B folks using them.
Two different evolutions paths ....
Shankar raises a very important point around user behavior. Apart from users thinking of a channel and then acting accordingly, I think users also tend to associate certain words with the channel they are going to use. Example when a person thinks about "let me call this person"...they automatically think of phone as the channel.
I agree that seamless, cross channel communication - is the ideal RTC and it is when we achieve this will we realize the complete potential of RTC. I am however not totally sure that this is really what is needed for RTC to succeed.
I agree with Ramu that the traditional phone is the best as it is totally idiot-proof...you can do only 1 thing with it and do it in a very reliable manner which has led to its success. Now, that paradigm is changing with the next generation cell phones...where the phone functionality is just a small aspect of what you can really do with it and the cell network is really not reliable. Same is happening with PCs where apart from a personal computing machine it is also becoming a communication endpoint with Internet as the network (a best effort network). So, if we believe in the traditional phone philosophy of "simple and reliable" as the main reason for its success...I see exactly these 2 as the barriers for RTCs success.
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