The Web Conferencing Blog

Microsoft RoundTable Video Gets Patent Suit

I'm a personal shareholder in Microsoft (MSFT), mainly because I love their gaming products: XBOX 360, but when it comes to business practices, Microsoft has never been known as a "fair" player. Then again, who really is?

FullView, a company based in NJ is suing Microsoft and its RoundTable Webcam for patent infringement. FullView is requesting the UC District Court for the Northen District of California to require Microsoft to stop selling RoundTable and award FullView triple damages.

FullView's patent dates back to 1995 and covers a camera system with continuous full 360-degree view. The patent was officially awarded to FullView in March 2004.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Live Meeting 2007 Launched

Microsoft has recently released Live Meeting 2007. Since it is still based off the old Placeware technology which is Java-based, I'm curious of the type of product and code changes that went into this version since Java and Windows play so nicely together. :)

Live Meeting 2007 starts off with a knockout punch, requiring a massive 15 MB download for first time attendees! How is that for listening to customer feedback and providing customers with the exact opposite: an even larger, more time-consuming client download so all attendees can wait even longer to join meetings...assuming they did not run into any firewall or Active X issues.

The roll-out of this new version is true to Microsoft-fashion: difficult and challenging with plenty of technical issues. Even though internal Microsoft sources confirmed that the 2007 version had multiple technical issues during beta testing and during their internal roll-out, they still released it. (Someone had their MBO's tied to a September launch, I presume.)

The launch was such a smash hit that Microsoft had to recall the Live Meeting 2007 Free Trial because there were too many recurring technical issues. The solution: Microsoft reverted back to Live Meeting 2005 for the free trial. After more extensive internal testing and troubleshooting, the problems were resolved...

...Earlier this week at Microsoft's Unified Communications launch event, the Microsoft Web Conferencing Team demoed Live Meeting 2007. What a graceful and flawless flop. Three specific areas got the audience to roll their eyes back and shrug shoulders with the, "Not again attitude."

1. When they attempted to use VoIP for the first time, the presenter and the remote attendee could not hear each other at all.
2. When the remote attendee was asked to share an application, it did not work.
3. Near the end of the product demo, when they thought the failed VoIP was fixed, they tried VoIP again and instead of no sound, the entire audience witnessed a loud screeching sound that made everyone cringe. (Finger nails on a chalkboard ring a bell?)

In addition, ZERO changes have been made to the Live Meeting architecture as it still employs a "store and forward" architecture, meaning users are still required to leverage the Microsoft iVault Server to store meeting content before, during and after meetings. Companies are not comfortable storing corporate or customer data on a server outside of the corporate firewall. This architecture, similar to all other web collaboration technologies, is why Live Meeting has not earned a single independent 3rd party security certification and why they continue to lose market share. (1999 they had 45%, 2007 they have 14%)

Other Microsoft Security Vulnerability News:

• October 11th: "Microsoft Warns of Dangerous URI Security Vulnerability"

Old David Letterman Bit on Microsoft:
Download letterman1.Gates.wmv

Thanks
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

 

MSFT Live Meeting Crashes!!!

Upon my return from Las Vegas, some very, very compelling news was waiting for me in my inbox..."Security Rivals Shut Out Of Microsoft Meeting." Microsoft hosted an online meeting last Thursday using their very own "Live Meeting" solution to discuss Windows Vista with Symantec and McAfee among others. About 15 minutes into the presentation, the meeting crashed and Symantec and McAfee were unable to log back in. Live Meeting Lay-off

"Microsoft hosted an online meeting this morning, but it never really got started," said Siobhan MacDermott, a McAfee spokeswoman. "Despite numerous attempts to reconnect, we were never able to get back into the meeting. However, we were notified that the meeting had ended."

Symantec had a similar experience, said Cris Paden, a company spokesman. "Our team was shut out, and only one person was able to get back in," he said. Live Meeting Blog

Apparently the Live Meeting camp said they sent out "wrong" invites to all attendees. (They sent out invites out as presenters.)

I can understand that these crashes can happen as no technology is 100% perfect, however, one still needs to question the Live Meeting platform as it pertains to scalability, security, fault tolerance and performance. Perhaps the meeting crashed because the "wrong" invitations were sent out, seems a bit unlikely to me but who knows? The reality is that there is not one company out there that would take on that risk and want be in the sames shoes as Microsoft on Thursday. Who would want to handle all that heat? For small companies, a meeting crash like this with their respective partners or clients...not sure if they would be able to bounce back like Microsoft could. The damage to reputation and credibility of a small to mid-size company might not be repairable.

(Live Meeting is a very small piece of the Microsoft Product Suite as it it part of "Information Worker" Business Unit meaning it competes for resources and funding with Microsoft Office and Visio. Pretty tough competition within the same product family. One has to wonder about the liklihood of Live Meeting getting lost in the shuffle of all the other Microsoft products that actually contribute significantly to Microsoft's top line.) More on Live Meeting

In simplest form, perhaps the meeting crashed because the system could not accommodate all attendees. The smaller security-based companies apparently had no issues logging in so why were some of the companies like Symantec and McAfee unable to log in while others were?

"More than 20 partners successfully signed on and participated in the meeting," the Microsoft representative said.

Note to self, "This is a serious RED FLAG when evaluating Live Meeting."

CNET Article on the Microsoft Meeting Crash
Tech Republic Blog on Live Meeting
Live Meeting Lay-off

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Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

A Blog from Tech Republic on LiveMeeting

An interesting "Why Can't MSFT LiveMeeting Stay Alive" BLOG from George Ou at Tech Republic. (http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/Ou/?p=215)

Why can't MS LiveMeeting stay alive?
Date: May 11, 2006 @ 5:19 am
Categories: Infrastructure

[Updated 1:35 PM: The cause for the problems with LiveMeeting has been found] Fellow blogger Marc Orchant had a super handy tip the other day to sign up for a Microsoft LiveMeeting seminar this morning given by author Cliff Atkinson. The topic was about moving beyond the same old boring bullet points that conventional wisdom tells us to do. Aside from a horrible meeting experience, I found the seminar so useful that I actually bought the book today since I've been boring my audience to tears with some of my long bullet point presentations. More on Live Meeting

Now you're probably wondering what this business about a horrible meeting experience is. Let me put it this way; Microsoft's Live Meeting has a long way to go! When I tried to sign on to the seminar this morning, it gave me an error that it was full and that I had to check back. Ok, maybe too many people joined and I'll just come back in a little bit and try again like the nice error message says. I come back 20 minutes later and it seems that I'm going to get through this time. LiveMeeting prompts me to download and install software, so I do it and install the LiveMeeting software and I finally get into the meeting half way through. While the initial delay was hard to excuse, I can let it slide since it's a free meeting and I'm a forgiving kind of person. But you would think it's clear sailing from now on right? Wrong! It gets worse, much worse. More on Live Meeting

As I navigate the LiveMeeting interface, it mysteriously vanishes on me except for one browser window that offers me a chance to reconnect. Ok, that was strange; so I click reconnect and get back in. At that point a friend on IM sends me a text note on Skype and a message box pops up and obtains focus (focus is the active Window or item on a graphical desktop interface). As soon as Skype obtains focus and LiveMeeting loses it, poof – my LiveMeeting session is gone and I have to sign back in again. At this point, I'm curious to see what happened so I clicked on the desktop again and poof LiveMeeting is dead and I have to sign on again. At this point, I had missed most of the seminar and I really wanted to finish it so I closed my IM stuff and exited all other applications that might pop up and obtain focus away from LiveMeeting. After all that, I rejoined the meeting and finished it.

So what's the reason for this crazy behavior? I'm not running any strange software and I'm running the latest patched version of IE6 with Windows XP SP2 so there nothing special about my system that should cause these problems. One possibility is that because the seminar was closed off for PDF exports, it is possible that I triggered some sort of security mechanism that LiveMeeting will auto-close thinking I might try and implement some sort of screen capture utility. If that was the case, it would be the dumbest thing I ever heard because this would really tick people off and I could use my high resolution digital camera to take pictures of the seminar and use an audio recorder if I had wanted to. If this isn't the reason and this is some sort of bug, I don't know how something this severe can get past quality assurance.

The truth of the matter is, most people probably won't care and will just stick to the mature web conferencing veteran WebEX. Microsoft bought WebEX competitor Placeware a few years ago which at the time was at a substantial technological disadvantage to WebEX. LiveMeeting seems to have caught up a little as far as its ability to process vector art and effects, but its usability is as bad as or worse than it's ever been.

Live Meeting Crashes
Live Meeting Lay-off

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Thanks,

David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

Live Meeting Lay-Off

Word on the street is that Microsoft laid-off the last group of Live Meeting sales reps earlier this week. Though I have not seen a formal press release come across the newswire, a few individuals that I am close to from the Live Meeting team have confirmed this to be true. More on Live Meeting

Apparently 50 sales reps were laid off, all of them coming from the Mountain View, CA office. 5 of the 50 sales reps that were considered "top performers" were offered a relocation option to move to Redmond, WA and maintain their employment with Microsoft as part of the customer service and upsell team. All managers were let go and some sort of severence package was offered.

With a sales team that was not generating enough revenue to validate its existence, the only other option for Microsoft is to try to sell Live Meeting strictly over the web or through their channels. They have tried this in the past with little success so we will just have to wait and see what will happen this go around. They continue to lose market share even after spending hundreds of millions of marketing dollars year after year on a product they cannot effectively sell. Lots of money going out, very little coming back in. They have not figured out the formula for success and the product just does not deliver what they say it can. When Microsoft's Annual Report does not clearly state the Live Meeting revenue contribution and makes no mention of customer retention or market share figures, it is clear that the numbers are not something Microsoft is proud of. More on Live Meeting

Yesterday, a colleague of mine spoke with a Wall Street analyst friend of his and their conversation took an interesting turn when the Live Meeting lay-off topic came up. (His firm is a shareholder of WebEx stock.) He was shocked to hear of the lay-off but commented:

"This is huge! This can only mean good things for WebEx. The perception of WebEx has always been that it would only be a matter of time before you guys got swallowed up by Microsoft. We were betting that you guys would weather the storm and come out on top because of your superior suite of products. It took 2 years but looks like we were right."

The conversation led to "What will they do? How will they sell Live Meeting? Will they just scrap the product as a whole? Are they more focused on fending off Google and keeping their eye on the bulk of their revenue: Windows and Office?" All very good questions that remain unanswered today.

Nollenberger Equity Research Report March 6, 2006

Live Meeting Crashes
Live Meeting Blog

Thanks,

David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert

NetMeeting is a Dinosaur!

Every now and then I will come across a company that still uses NetMeeting as a customer-facing communication tool. I never understand why a company would subject their customers, partners, or prospects to the time consuming process required to establish a connection with NetMeeting. Imagine starting a customer meeting with, "Sure Mr. Customer, I can show you a quick demo of my product but can you first get your IT Admin on the phone so we can ask him/her if it's okay to open up ports in the firewall, make a quick configuration to the proxy server, and provide us with your IP address so I can get connected to you? Second, if other people want to see the demo, great but they have to watch the demo with you on your computer since NetMeeting is designed for only one on one's and it's daisy chain architecture creates a performance bottleneck if more people join...Thanks."

After spending 10-15 minutes finding the IT Admin and establishing a connection, you finally begin the demo. Five minute pass by and the customer asks if they can "test drive" the application. (They can't with NetMeeting) Then they ask if it's your product or NetMeeting that is slow. (You tell them it's NetMeeting of course but wonder if the customer thinks otherwise.) Then the meeting abruptly ends for no reason but you tell the customer that you accidently closed the connection and apologize. Finally, as you wrap things up, you wonder why they said, "Well, the budget is really tight right now. We are just collecting information and doing a tirekicking session, thanks for your time. We'll get back to you when things start picking up." (How to Establish a Netmeeting Connections Through a Firewall)

This is a scenario that I hear all the time from my personal customers who reduced their technology risk and made the switch.

If this isn't enough to get companies to start looking at alternative high-touch web collaboration solutions, how about the fact that Microsoft has discontinued this FREE product! (Download NetMeeting at CNET.com) What's Microsoft saying about their very own technology if they discontinue it and no longer support it? In addition, it lacks tools to monitor usage, lacks API's for integration, and does not support a record and playback capability necessary for compliance with new requirements for audit trails such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Bottom line...NetMeeting is difficult to setup, not reliable, and is subject to many performance issues. It is a high risk gamble if you plan to use it for customer communications. Potential consequences...lost deals, lost revenue, lost market share, dissatisfied customers, update the resume, find a new job.

Thanks,
David Chao
The Web Conferencing Expert