People like to communicate the way *they* want to, not the way they are *made* to. Furthermore, employees now expect access to consumer class "usable" technologies in their business environments - "Consumer Grade" trumps "Business Grade" 10 times out of 10.
This is the world of Communications In The Cloud, where the synchronous modalities of Voice and Text meet the asynchronous modalities of Email, SMS, IM, Twitter, and the like. These modalities can - poorly - emulate each other, but genuine innovation and value is provided by services that can seamlessly move across these synchronous and asynchronous channels as users' needs change.
Communications can be Synchronous or Asynchronous. For the purposes of this talk, Sync vs. Async refers to whether you can detect whether the person at the other end is there or not…
Synchronouse - Talking
Synchronous – video phones
In Asynchronous – the other person might have have taken off for a bio-break, but you can’t tell when you send them an SMS/ping/whatever…
Highly asynchronous
The most common form of async communications – IM / SMS / Email
Facebook is async too!
Even reading a book! (ok, this isn’t really “Real Time”, but whatever) Itsasync communication from the author’s mind to your mind
Sequential –Async from the author to dad, and sync from dad to daughter
Parallel – “Hey, check out this coolKitteh video”
Whats so special about Business-Grade?
There are 27 Million of these IP handsets sold every year. !!!
Who remembers numbers anymore?
Because everyone (!) thinks in contacts nowadays. Not phone numbers.
BLF? Really? This is the best we can do for presence?
The AIM approach to presence is now ubiquitous.
OK. The Handset is awesome, but in the end it is for lean back conversations.
Everybody, however, wanders around with one of these in their ears. Everyone
Where it wins – The Break Test. If you hit someone upside the head with this phone, what will break? The phone? Or the head? With these phones, the head. But then again, nowadays who cares?
Setting up Video Conferencing can be a complete nightmare
A Hangout – on the other hand, is one of the most trivial multi-point video-conferencing facilities in existence.
Consumer grade is the new Business Grade
The epitome of Consumer Grade. Is this a curse?
What about Reliability? “Busines Grade?” Does anybody actually like this stuff?My (highly unscientific) survey of Fortune 50 companies has shown that nobody likes their Corporate “Business Grade” applications
The bottom line is that Peopledon’t care. They just want stuff to work. Consumer Grade is the new Business Grade.
We have molded the way we communicate to the tool we have. Historically, we had no option
The original phone
The first morph – the integrated handset
The second morph. Pushbuttons
And that’s it. Nothing has changed since then
People don’t care. They just want stuff to work
Till “consumer grade” went critical. This is not a phone.
Really. The iPhone is not a phone. You can call with it, but the sheer number of things you can do with it is over the top...
We’ve always done Communications as a feature. We’re just realizing that this is what we do (click to email predates the dawn of the web – we had it with Gopher!!!)
Nowadays, “Social” stuff like FB and Twitter are ubiquitious
And now, voice is getting added to the mix. Atomic events such as Click-to-Call are everywhere
Outbound C2C – You can’t get call-center software without this!
Inbound C2C – if you sit is clickableee a phone number on a page, odds are that
Whats missing is State, i.e., the ability to not just do atomic things like C2C, but “group” related stuff
Knowing what other people that you interact with (or like to interact with) should not be complicated
But, on the other hand, it tends to be more like mind-reading nowadays
Multi-party calling is a PITA
Remember “Three-way-calling”? Nobody could ever figure out how to use it. They still can’t. But it should be trivial You should never have to utter the mantra “I’m going to try and conference you in, if this drops, I’ll call you back”
And merging different types of communication should be the default
Skype does it. Hangouts do it. But, seriously every body should do it
Scenarios are exploding
If you have a GPS enabled phone, why do you ever have to utter the mantra “I’m about to go into a tunnel, if the call drops, I’ll call you back”???
When will everything get transcribed? And be searchable?
What is a better identifier for data lookups? CallerID
What is a better identifier for data lookups? Obviously, UniqueIds.
Text To Speech Whispering – should be available by default. Sometimes
Tavis Rudd coding (highly async communication)
In the future (heck, now), everything will be customizable. The world is moving to where people are communicating the way they want to, not the way they are allowed to!!!