4 ms·

>Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have be

• mschuster91 3y ago
  > This isn't surprising at all, Skype for Business was a joke - the verb used at the time was Webex. What is shocking is how horribly Cisco bungled the entire thing. They went from market dominance (61% market share) to almost an afterthought in a matter of a year. Webex was just as bad and unreliable as Skype for Business, the only reason why that shit even existed was that it integrated nicely with your existing Cisco telephony and conference room hardware. First, Zoom came in with an extremely easy to use solution right when Covid hit, and Teams sealed the fate of both by being cheap to effectively free and being even lower in barrier to entry - including the effort for compliance stuff like SSO and auditing which eventually grew more important for companies as the "it's a pandemic" excuse ceased to be viable. Personally, I do not think that there is a chance that MS Teams can be displaced any more in the enterprise space, simply because of the compliance overhead that everyone else has to do while it's considered "done" for companies that already use Office 365. And now that MS is offering VoIP integration, companies are also ditching their expensive and, let's be honest given their reputation for security issues, insecure Cisco stuff.
  • ajmurmann 3y ago
    Without a Cisco device WebEx was such a nightmare. I don't think video worked in any call I ever joined that didn't use Cisco equipment. Somehow computer audio was usually unavailable for reasons I don't understand. This was before bluetooth audio was omnipresent due to AirPods and I had to use the shit phone speakers and microphone. For me it always was the worst experience of any conferencing tool by a wide margin.
• pmarreck 3y ago
  Webex is definitely a lesson in never accepting that you've won no matter what your marketshare in a space is, especially if the "switch cost" is essentially nil
  • FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    I dunno. Half the interviews I had in last 6 months were Webex invites. The other half MS Teams and one radom Google Meet in there. (in Germany, so probably Webex is more sticky with these dinosaur companies over here)
    • pmarreck 3y ago
      I'm German (firstborn American, really, but all my relatives are over there) and as a tech guy it's always surprised and dismayed me, especially over the last 20-odd years, just how significantly laggardly the German world is technologically. I don't know if it's a conflict of values, Helmut Kohl being a complete Luddite idiot (and the bad legacy thereof), or some other combination of things, but Germany sure seems to have some very smart people who are also very lacking the benefits of tech that are routinely enjoyed in the States. (They would surely argue that they are, in turn, also enjoying the lack of drawbacks of some of those things, such as increased general population fitness/health, etc.) Had I been born there instead of here, I often wonder how things would have turned out as I got starved of exposure to computers, modems, programming languages, Internet, cell service, etc... I mean, I know there are communities of people there who are into all of those things, but it certainly seems to be massively de-emphasized Did I mention Helmut Kohl made some of the worst decisions possible in this area? It cannot be underemphasized how badly he mis-stepped on this stuff.
      • rvba 3y ago
        Could you please explain what he did exactly?
        • pmarreck 3y ago
          Well, it's not just his decision, but it did end up having a broader cooling effect in general. This is a decent explanation of the current Internet situation in Germany and the historical decisions that were contributions to it: https://www.settle-in-berlin.com/why-is-internet-so-bad-in-germany/ https://www.settle-in-berlin.com/why-is-internet-so-bad-in-g... It's hilarious that Angela Merkel said "the Internet is new territory" in 2013, nearly 20 years after it first burst onto the dialup scene.
• sidewndr46 3y ago
  my assumption was Cisco no longer cared about that business line. Is that wrong?
  • brazzledazzle 3y ago
    Based on their features and bug fixes in their releases and how it got progressively worse in terms of reliability/performance for the backend: I think it was clear they made a decision to stop investing/prioritizing it and only tried to fix things when they realized they had their market share absolutely annihilated in no time flat. I can't imagine it was a "surprise" to anyone in management there but I'm not sure they expected resting on their laurels to result in major blowback as fast as it did.
  • tw04 3y ago
    Very much not the case. They just got lazy because the competition was so bad. Pandemic hit and they got destroyed with the increased traffic causing businesses to rapidly seek alternatives. IIRC Cisco owned most of the underlying infrastructure and just couldnt scale fast enough.
    • sidewndr46 3y ago
      That seems kind of hard to imagine that Cisco couldn't scale fast enough. But if it is, there is a total corporate failure on their part.