On October 22, Better Place, the innovative provider of electric vehicle services, announced they are going to install their first set of car chargers in Jerusalem, Israel. If you haven't heard of Better Place, it is a company that is trying to change the world and make it greener by replacing all the cars in the world from petrol ones to electric ones.one step at a time.As a pure skeptic, I used to think of it as a delusion of their "star" CEO, Shai Agassi, an Israeli entrepreneur who was said to be the next in line to become the CEO of SAP. What changed my mind about this project, was a TED Talk of his that I saw a few months ago---one that I highly recommend:
Essentially, what Shai Agassi is doing is trying to solve the chicken and egg problem: What comes first? The electric car? Or the infrastructure to support it (the equivalent of the "gas" stations network)? So Better Place is starting "small," selecting areas where cars are driven in relatively small confined geographical areas (Israel, for instance, which is small and isolated from its neighbors), it creates a "better" place, where the necessary ecosystem can become a reality.
The thing is, that the electric car is still a few years down the road. True--the first ones will be available relatively soon, but mass production will take more time. And still--the infrastructure is being built towards that vision. Somehow I have a feeling that Better Place will actually make this a better place and will succeed with its utopian dream.
But what does that has to do with Video Conferencing?
It's the chicken and egg.
Video conferencing started more than ten years ago. When I first came to RADVISION in 1998, we already had an MCU and a gateway for video conferencing that were actually sold to customers. But if you look around you, even today, it will be hard to say that the infrastructure , or ecosystem, is ready for video conferencing:
* Broadband is still not commonplace, at least not in some countries
* Connection latencies and packet losses are commonplace on international routes
* Upstream bandwidths are ridiculously low
This is changing fast and in the next couple of years our Internet will probably become ubiquitous enough for video conferencing.
So what the hell has our industry been doing this past decade? We've been trying to build products for customers when the infrastructure wasn't really there. We've opted for providing the car before we knew where the charging stations were going to be located.
It's no wonder then that up until now video was limited to a niche and that its antagonists say it adds no value over voice conferencing.
I guess that if video conferencing were to start today as a market, it would have grown considerably faster than it has up until now--simply because it would have been a lot easier to build the infrastructure and ecosystem it requires around it instead of waiting for it to come along on its own.
And in the next few years, we will be able to see if video conferencing adds value over voice or if it is useless to most. I believe it adds value. A lot of value.
