While this tech is exciting for a wide variety of reasons, this blog post completely misses the point for me in its efforts to hype this.
> imagine it amplified by secure, real-time transmissions of audio and video
Ok, I'm imagining it. And I'll still be imagining it in 12 months time, because WebRTC does nothing to fix the outstanding issues in setting up secure communications.
> Skype, Cisco, and Polycom will all see their conferencing technology commoditized.
Really? Surely you could have said that Cisco / Polycom would be destroyed by Skype, but that didn't happen. Why would in-browser conferencing, which will almost certainly be a worse experience than Skype, which is itself a far worse experience than dedicated conference hardware/software, commoditize conference technology?
And for that matter, why did the wide variety of already-existing browser-based conferencing tech not do this?
Personally I'm more excited about ideas like P2P downloading, and using DHTs to disseminate information.
Because a general purpose device (in this case, the browser) generally falls behind in a few ways compared to a specific purpose device (in this case Skype). A few examples:
Stability: For Skype to break, you need to either crash Skype or the entire computer or O/S. For your in-browser conferencing, you just need the web browser to crash.
Connectivity: Skype has put huge amounts of work into punching through firewalls, and has many settings dedicated to that. Furthermore it's a common enough option on SOHO/consumer routers to let it through. P2P browser connectivity just isn't there yet.
Security: Our firewall at work is configured to allow Skype through. I doubt it's configured to let browsers open direct raw socket connections to any IP and port they please. I can't even begin to imagine how a network administrator is supposed to lock these capabilities down, other than completely disallowing them.
UX: Again, Skype is a dedicated program so it can do a lot more. It can keep a little overlay window open in the corner of your screen so you can look at a web page or document but keep an eye on your call. It can hook into the O/S to ensure your microphone is selected and unmuted. It can tell your music player to pause when a call comes in. None of this is possible with a browser (yes, you could add APIs, but where do you stop - are browsers going to become the next JVM, creating a cross-platform API that plasters over the differences between O/S's?)
My last point is mildly tangential: Why would P2P in-browser conferencing disrupt Skype / Polycom when it has literally zero perceivable difference to the end-user compared to regular client-server in-browser conferencing (other than the fact that with P2P you will be able to connect to fewer people than in the client-server model)?
> imagine it amplified by secure, real-time transmissions of audio and video
Ok, I'm imagining it. And I'll still be imagining it in 12 months time, because WebRTC does nothing to fix the outstanding issues in setting up secure communications.
> Skype, Cisco, and Polycom will all see their conferencing technology commoditized.
Really? Surely you could have said that Cisco / Polycom would be destroyed by Skype, but that didn't happen. Why would in-browser conferencing, which will almost certainly be a worse experience than Skype, which is itself a far worse experience than dedicated conference hardware/software, commoditize conference technology?
And for that matter, why did the wide variety of already-existing browser-based conferencing tech not do this?
Personally I'm more excited about ideas like P2P downloading, and using DHTs to disseminate information.