Remember the little “peanut men” of clip-art, circa 1995? It was a simpler time. Telephones were telephones, computers were computers, and unless you were The Computer Answer Guy, ne’er did the twain meet.
You want that time back, don’t you?
Yesterday’s post about bandwidth speeds being too difficult to qualify sent me on a trip down memory lane. Pinpointing how fast your downloads are running really can be hard, there are no “Any” Keys, and in general, computers are too hard to use.
In their continuing effort to stave off irrelevancy, Microsoft keeps branching into new businesses. The beast from Redmond will never again see the same kind of dominance they enjoyed with Windows and Office, but lately they’re making some pretty good moves.
No, Bing won’t be overtaking Google. That whole battery thing is neat, but not a behemoth of Microsoftian proportions. And yes, XBox is huge, but again, a niche.
When AT&T makes your long distance phone calls cheaper, you know there’s real business change happening. When AT&T makes international calls placed from your cell phone a lot cheaper, business change has EXPLODED.
And that’s exactly what’s happened. AT&T has released a SmartPhone app that gives you international phone calls for as little as four cents per minute.
This may not matter all that much to all that many people; sure, there are about a gazillion international phone calls placed every day, but I’d say with some confidence that most of the calls placed by most Americans are to other people in the USA. Nevertheless, AT&T was charging a tremendous amount of money for these calls, and now they’ve thrown that revenue away.
How’d you like to do high resolution video calls through your high definition TV? How’d you like to spend way, way, way too much for the privelege? Then hustle out right now and buy yourself a Cisco ūmi.
Not interested? No kidding.
Five months ago, Cisco introduced the ūmi. As I told you then, the $600 price tag for the ūmi hardware plus $25 monthly fee to use ūmi would have made no sense even if the your Internet connection could manage the bandwidth necessary to support 1080P video calls over ūmi. Here in the USA, almost nobody’s can.
I have seen the future. And it certainly is not Cisco’s new video conferencing system. ūmi ( that’s its name) takes a cute enough idea and finds every possible way to break it.
I won’t pick on that silly name. I’m sure it means something very cool that Cisco spent hundreds of thousands of dollars researching (actually, ūmi just means YOU and ME; get it?) . But hold onto your hats: ūmi costs $600 up front, plus a $25 monthly subscription cost. Or, you can do the same thing through your computer, your SmartPhone, or any number of other devices, fire up a copy of Skype, and get the whole thing for free.
Ignore for the moment that certain kinds of multitasking are just plain dangerous. Ditto the oft-documented fact that in general multi-tasking is a bad idea. If you do video calling, there’s a new problem with multi-tasking that you might not have thought about.
It’s rude. And the person you’re speaking with on a video call can see what you’re doing.
I had a chance to experience this issue first-hand a few days ago—or rather, I didn’t; I’m happy to tell you that neither I nor the client I was doing video with was rude. Throughout, we spoke with each other except when one of us said “hey look at this!” and the other went off to the Internet to do so.
Here’s a Business Change you need to think about right now: Are you speaking the same language as your customers? I have opinions about outsourcing to far-flung countries, but today’s context has nothing to do with that.
Today being the first day of the month, we were getting ready to send out the monthly Answer Guy / Virtual VIP Newsletter. We use a popular email management service to send the newsletter every month, and something was going wrong. I used the vendor’s instant messaging application, got a representative on line in a matter of seconds, and . . . well, I won’t bore you with the details of this friendly-but-ultimately-not-productive customer service / technical support experience.
I love how often bad software companies blame their bad software problems on the biggest, baddest software factory of them all.
OK, actually, I hate it. I make a living primarily by working with the mess that their software so often is, but I’m not a big Microsoft basher (hmmmm . . . maybe that’s why I’m not . . .)
When Skype, fresh from their 48-hour no-service-for-anyone-but-really-we-swear-it’s-not-everybody debacle last week, decided to blame Microsoft for the problem, my first thought was “same old stuff”. That though lasted about a nanosecond. Skype tells us, and has now spent as long reaffirming the claim as the problem existed, that it was Microsoft’s regular monthly Windows update that crashed their software all over the world.
I remember back in the day when setting up a computer network was . . . well honestly, if was pretty difficult. Most networks used coaxial cables (we’re talking “the dawn of ethernet” timeframe), and rather than all the computers connecting through hubs or switches they ran in a big circle or along a straight line.
This meant that if one computer in the network went down, the whole thing went down. Literally.
The joke in those days was “imagine if IBM ran the phone network . . . every time a new phone was installed, everyone who already had one would need to reboot”.
Answer Guy Central Influency and Integrated Marketing, New York NY 10128
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