When I heard the news of Google Presentations my first thought was not: It’s more competition for MSFT as part of the Docs & Spreadsheets suite. The thing that popped into my head was that it’s potential competition for WebEx, which was recently acquired by Cisco.
Even though there are many online sharing/conferencing options the market is still ripe for a full-blown competitor to the bloated and difficult to use WebEx. In my experience it doesn’t work 50% of the time I’m on calls with people trying to use it.
April 19, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Your insight about Google looking to challenge WebEx is solid. But your analysis of WebEx’s tool is completely in accurate!
WebEx provides an extremely reliable, stable and effective medium by which to share documents, presentations and spreadsheets via the internet. In fact, the WebEx tool is the most reliabel available – far more user-friendly and relaible than Microsoft’s Live Meeting tool!
Frankly, you sound like someone that does not understand web conferencing space, but rather is blogging to blog and try to generate some kind of audience for themselves.
When the Google tool is ready – really ready, not just a BETA tool – then, we can have a REAL conversation.
April 19, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Web conferencing is not something I cover — true. But your remarks are somewhat ill informed. I’m speaking not from the perspective of an industry analyst re Web conferencing but as a user and my statements accurately reflect my experience.
My blog is very clear about what I cover.
I’m not trying to be sensational to “generate an audience” for myself. I’m just making observations.
You sound like a company representative and should disclose that if in fact it’s true.
April 19, 2007 at 3:58 pm
Your assessment of WebEx quality and reliability is absolutely accurate and true. The service experience works 1/2 time and other times it completely unreliable – whether in logging in or whether in navigating and having to use their proprietary formats to project power point slides. I have had much better experience in using Microsoft Office Live Meeting.
April 19, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Webex was a horrid experience. I tried VNC based presentations — too hard on the clients. Now I use gotomeeting (http://www.gotomeeting.com). Easy to use, cheap, fixed monthly price independent of number of meetings.
April 19, 2007 at 7:44 pm
Our company (http://glance.net) offers a simple one-button screen sharing tool for web demos and training. Customers often tell us they prefer our “less is more” approach, because there are no buttons or menus that might confuse or distract their guests. Techies say “less” means there’s less that might go wrong. We believe both are right.
April 19, 2007 at 7:52 pm
I get a lot of feedback about WebEx lag and overcomplication myself. ConferenceCalls.com is running a free web conferencing promo until June 30th…our service is reliable, allows file/desktop sharing and real powerpoint presentations, and doesn’t require any downloads. We take customer service very seriously, so if you give us a try, please let me know how you like our web conferencing.
April 20, 2007 at 6:33 am
I love the WebEx bashers on this blog. So please explain how WebEx was able to build a business generating over $350 in annual revenue, capture over 60% of the market, and sell it’s business to Cisco for $3.2 billion? It’s obvious the WebEx haters work for competitors… One last thing, please explain why all the biggest companies have standardized on WebEx?
http://boeing.webex.com
http://dell.webex.com
http://symantec.webex.com
http://merck.webex.com
http://adpevents.webex.com
http://pfizer.webex.com
And thirty thousand more…
April 20, 2007 at 11:02 am
[…] thoughts: this plays into my “threat to WebEx” suggestion earlier and that this will potentially become part of the enterprise version of […]
April 21, 2007 at 12:47 am
Our company WebMeeting123 (http://WebMeeting123.com) offer a browser based solution that requires no client side downloads.
Our WebMeeting123 LE solution is just as easy to use as Glance, has more features and costs less than half the price!
The web conferencing space is certainly crowded, but with web collaboration usage predicted to skyrocket in the coming years, there is room for all.
March 7, 2012 at 9:29 pm
Gold Mutual Funds…
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