Hearing the Voice from Cisco’s Chambers

In Saturday’s WSJ, Cisco Systems CEO John Chambers explains parts of the long term strategy to survive a downturn.  One thing that seems to be a theme of the new strategy, beyond the buzzword of the moment, Web 2.0, is their interest in video.

It’s their big, open, yet dirty secret. Two different video technologies that they are working in, extremely expensive video conferencing rooms, and the Flip, are mentioned explicitly.  They think the next wave is video- us on screen as an ideal way of collaboration.

Video technology has been around for a while.  Skype has been around for public use since 2002, and most major chat clients (not chat aggregate clients, like Pidgin) now also offers video.  Further, public betas are being announced for companies like Watchittoo.com are opening up the social aspect of video, allowing multiple person conferences while also being able share another stream of content from websites like YouTube.  Their success rides on the simplicity of making contact, their freemiumness, and their close adaptation of other related technologies, such as chat programs, in order to pass links, files, and other data simply.

Of the two technologies they are currently talking up in this article, the Flip is the only one that really fits into this little world.  It’s portable, tiny, and cheap enough to be bought by a good chunk of the American populace and become a breakthrough product in other countries with middle class wants as well.  It creates files into an easy to upload manner, in a way that is shareable by all (who care).  It’s portability means video is on demand; as soon as the moment strikes, there is the availability to tape it.  Video is now open to the masses in ways it wasn’t before.

Video-conferencing, on the other hand, seems to be almost dated.  The technology surrounding it is not necessarily intuitive: Although at the most basic level, there is a standard for the units to talk to each other, each company seems to like modifying the protocol slightly so that they and only they can dominate their market-share (stupid I know).  Further, the OS and tools associated (remote controls, typing in IP addresses) are unintuitive, hampering adoption of even relatively cheap units.  (Full disclosure, my father sells used video conferencing units, though not Cisco’s).  They lack the elegance required to really see their short term upside potential.  It’s unclear why Cisco wants to continue down this path unless they see an eventual out in a field of convergence to another device, much Like Radvision is trying to pull off.

Even so, without cooperating and cutting costs, the desire for freemium, and multi-connective services, as shown by the chat program, won’t be satisfied by a camera that hogs bandwidth to make your image crystal clear to the person on the other end.  Unless Cisco can convince their partners in videoconferencing to lower costs and to make other forms of sharing more accessible over one’s TV at the same time, Video Conferencing for the masses will not be coming any time soon, the way they managed to pull off video creation via the Flip.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Cisco profits dip, but still beat the Street (news.cnet.com)
• Cisco Cuts 700 in “Ongoing Restructuring” (gigaom.com)
• Bits: Cisco Preens on TelePresence (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Cisco on Its Forecast, Telepresence and Competing with H-P and IBM (blogs.wsj.com)