There have been a few posts suggesting WebRTC is a failure.
Most of them look at their watches and count the minutes from the moment WebRTC was announced (at times overshooting by a year or so), and deduce from that that the game is over.
If you ask me, we haven't even begun to understand where we are headed.
WebRTC was announced in May 2011. The first (somewhat) supporting version of Chrome for it came out in November 2011. We haven't been through three years yet. To those who don't know – WebRTC isn't even standardized yet – it is still a work in progress.
That said, it hasn't taken the wind out of the sails of roughly 500 vendors and individual developers who are tinkering with the technology and even releasing commercial products to the market with WebRTC.
There are two areas where we are lacking miserably in my view:
1. Market attention – Telecom knows about WebRTC, but WebRTC doesn't really care about telecom. Web developers aren't aware of WebRTC. You can see the effect in the number of LinkedIn profiles that mention WebRTC
2. No DevOps - DevOps is a trendy term used for cloud IT people. These are the people who run a service (usually on the cloud in some form of XaaS offering) on a daily basis – those in charge of making sure the service doesn't go down.
In a recent survey I held with the good guys of webrtcHacks, we asked readers about the type of development they do with WebRTC. Here's what we got:
DevOps is lagging far behind all the rest. We know how to develop stuff with WebRTC, but I am assuming there's not much in the realm of domain expertise when it comes to operating these services later on down the road. There is not enough heritage and scars collected in the rigorous process of running large scale services over long periods of time.
This will come later. My expectation is to see more of DevOps in WebRTC in the second half of 2015.Looking for an indicator that WebRTC is flourishing? Monitor the trends in DevOps for WebRTC.
