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Net Meetings

You've flown from New York to London for a luncheon meeting, then on to Paris for an evening meeting. From Paris, you must travel to Russia for company visits, then back to New York. These meetings took weeks to arrange, and you have almost forgotten why it was necessary to get together. Almost a week will have elapsed, with a good part spent in and around planes and hotels and in meetings that were not quite relevant . . . but they were scheduled.

Sound like you? It sounds like many people, who say to themselves "there has to be a better way." And there is . . . Net Meetings! (I am aware that "NetMeeting" is part of the Microsoft Office 97 suite-this meeting program is rapidly being enhanced with "NetShow" incorporating the recently-bought Vxtreme-and Netscape has its useful "Net Messenger" for spontaneous chats across net connections, an extension of AOL's popular "Buddy Chat" forum. Nevertheless, Net Meetings is an apt name for the generic application of chat-across-the-web.)

Twenty years ago, AT&T set up videoconferencing facilities in four locations to test business demand for video meetings. I remember making extensive use of these elaborate but inexpensive (they were heavily subsidized) facilities. They were studio- quality and well-staffed. The idea was that teams in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco would go to AT&T's locations in those cities to be "hooked up." Technically, it worked fine, and going several blocks was easier than flying to another city. But it was a flop. People did not like the stiff quality of the meetings and, usually, one party was expected, at any cost, effort and time, to go to the other. After a few years, AT&T gave up this innovative idea without altering the model.

Now we are back with a host-and-a-half of new tools that do approximately the same thing. And they are succeeding immensely. PictureTel, the daddy of the industry, has revenue growth of nearly 40% a year. And Netscape's Net Conference and Microsoft's NetMeeting are bringing video meetings to the desktop. Sure, quality is rough, especially when lines are busy. But it is personal, virtually cuddly.

AT&T forgot Marshall McCluhan's message that TV was a hot medium and you should be a cool character (Kennedy, not Nixon). Not used to show biz, with mics in front of them and staff running around getting everything just right, business people got stiff under the lights. But now, there is a little camera on top of the monitor, hardly to be seen, which picks up the video image. And Intel's new chips have videoconferencing capability, so that feature can easily be added by hardware manufacturers.

Meetings can be archived and retrieved by others on the web at any time. Today's term for such a meeting is GroupWare. These programs allow a number of people in widely dispersed locations to exchange ideas and work on common projects and files, all at the same time. A good one to try, if you haven't done so already is NetMeeting, bundled with MS Internet Explorer 4.0. You can bring all the glitz you have patience for to a GroupWare event.

Larger meetings and conventions are getting more like Net Meetings. Electronic events parallel the "in corpus" ones. Speeches captured in streaming video can be replayed on demand. Software from sources like Real Video are widely used, and some of the more exotic offerings, like Vxtreme, are used daily by ABC News and others. The keynote speeches, call-in talk shows, and special events at the Fall 1997 Comdex show in Las Vegas, for example, were captured in video and audio and "webcast" during and after the show. Almost every convention company is preparing rapidly for the day, not that far away, when their meetings will be entirely electronic.

Meetings won't be the dirty word of Dilbert in this electronic world. It will be hard to separate a meeting from an engagement . . . and you can always claim technical difficulty if it gets boring.

Dean LeBaron
December 26, 1997

email <deanlebaron@compuserve.com>

website <http://www.deanlebaron.com>