• http://betanews.com/2014/05/26/skype-vs-lync-the-case-for-killing-off-skype/

It’s a bit long (who am I to talk!), but the points are very valid and exacerbated by the fact that Enterprise Customers, like Carlsberg, are tying our IT roadmaps very closely to Microsofts when we switch to Office 365 and Lync.

There’s nothing worse than staking your IT roadmap on a product with an unclear strategy and confusing design decisions.

So what is it that Microsoft should be doing? Well, before I go into that, let me start by saying that I’m perfectly aware that the team working on this are dealing with a ton of commercial, organisational, and technical constraints that I’m completely oblivious to. No input from my side should therefore be taken to imply any disrespect. I am simply stating what I, as representative of a somewhat largish customer and tasked with the responsibility of ensuring we invest our money wisely, would like to see them do.

[pullquote position=”right” hidden=”true”]They could just give away the LRS software, let people like me roll out our €200 meeting rooms, and stand back and watch the Lync licenses pour in while the competition goes up in smoke.[/pullquote]

Firstly, I’d like to see them leverage the fact that video conferencing today is grossly overpriced. Sticking a Rasperry Pi in a TV-set with a camera on top doesn’t make it worth €8000. It’s the software that glue it together and their competition have based their business on bundling everything into packages. Microsoft doesn’t have to do that. They could just give away the LRS software as a stand-alone (or developer package), let people like me roll out our €200 meeting rooms, and stand back and watch the Lync licenses pour in while the competition goes up in smoke or lower their prices. It worked for Android now let it work for you.

Secondly, I’d like to see them step up their Lync Online game. Routing traffic over your own WAN or replacing your ISDN/PBX with a Lync Server is probably a hot item with many “traditionalist” customers, but why cater to them when you can change the game? Offer ISDN gateways, distributed local break-outs, and everything else needed to replace WAN traffic and PBX’s via a service instead, and they’ll have pulled the carpet under Ciscos incessant “we have the routers, only we can guarantee the quality” sales pitch.

Finally, I’d like to see them thinking outside the box. In the retail space Kinects have already proven that they can pinpoint exactly where you hold your hand when placed in the ceiling. Why not use this to pinpoint where I’m holding my finger on a whiteboard? Why not use this, with the projector that’s already in most meeting rooms, to create a two-way interactive whiteboard? Why not also show me where the guy in the remote room is pointing on the whiteboard or the presentation? Isnt’ this what you’re already showing in your future vision?

It may be that Anton Krantz and the other guys in the Lync team are way ahead of me on this. Maybe they’ve already developed it and are holding it back for a reason; maybe they’ve decided not to do it due to factors I’m unaware of; and maybe they’re just better at their job than I am, because let’s face it it: It’s their job and not mine.

The only thing I can say is that, as an enterprise customer with at least 500 meeting rooms spread across the world and in full swing with deploying Lync Online to every user, the LRS, as it stands today, is not something we are going to invest in anytime soon.

It’s too much like everything else  in a market, where changes require huge investments. So although Microsoft may very well win in the end, their strategy so far could make them miss the opportunity of a lifetime: To define new rules, carve out a greenfield market of their own, and set a new standard for enterprise video-conferencing.

Update:

Just had a chat with one of the guys in the Lync developer team, and apparently they’re already working on at least two of the above suggestions, so good on ya! Can’t wait to try it out!

Now what is the problem with providing a Lync Room System? Obviously the benefits touted in the release blogpost are mostly true. You do save time on starting meetings, it will bring better utilization than the old conferencing systems, it does provide more screen real-estate and therefore better interaction, and meetings do get easier to manage.

[pullquote position=”right” hidden=”true”]Microsoft are taking micro-steps when they should be swinging both arms and throwing game-changers from the roof-tops.[/pullquote]

The problem isn’t that this isn’t a step forward, but that it is a very small step forward, and they need much more than a small step.

Firstly because it takes more than a small step to disrupt this market. A video-conferencing room starts at around €8000 and goes steeply upwards to around €120.000, and even though the MS partners solutions on this come in at the low end of the scale, you’d have to be in a pretty lucrative business to just throw out all that investment and replace it with yet another two screens with a camera on top.

Secondly, because most other players in this market are also introducing nice tablet remotes to make them easier to use, start meetings faster, and make meetings easier to manage. The only new things MS is bringing to the table are the Lync client, which Cisco is already doing their best to copy, and the Lync user-base. A small step is therefore nothing more than what everybody else are also doing.

Thirdly, because the video-conferencing market is overripe for disruption. Nobody in their right minds is going to pay €8000 for two flatscreen panels and an HD camera with a bit of software thrown on top any longer. Just using off-the-shelf USB hardware I’m rolling out rooms at around €200 across Carlsberg right now, and before you get too excited that these are all for Lync conferences, consider the fact that this is standard USB hardware. I could switch them to Google Voice or FaceTime in a heartbeat, so it’s not going to protect MS if a more progressive player comes along.

The net result is that Microsoft are taking micro-steps when they should be swinging both arms and throwing game-changers from the roof-tops. They have momentum to start edging out established players, but they’re not changing the world and the world is about to change on them.

Final Post (3 of 3) ->

[pullquote position=”right” hidden=”true”]When I see a new player in the market, I don’t expect them to just do what the others do with a new logo on top.[/pullquote]

In 2013 Microsoft decided to move Lync into the corporate conferencing space with their Lync Room System (LRS). Until then, Lync had been primarily a client for chat, video, and desktop sharing in a crowded market. They’d bought Skype, presumably to get some traction in the consumer space, but to companies, Lync was still mainly “that client we get for free when negotiating enterprise agreements”. For real video-conferencing it was all a “Cisco game” with big dusty rooms and expensive hardware.

So what do you do in a market like that? You disrupt. You throw a wrench in the wheel. You do something they never saw coming and you do it in a way that will take them years to get over. You claw out your own niche, take ownership of the Gartner challenger quadrant and encroach on the leaders from there.

Well, with hyperbole like “the biggest transformations in the way we work since the advent of the PC”, you’d think Microsoft had understood this, but what did they do? They built LRS.

To be fair, LRS did bring a big improvement to Lync. Instead of executives having to fiddle around with USB hardware on their own, they now had an integrated conference room experience on par with the best in the market. The problem is that “on par” doesn’t cut it. What Microsoft brought wasn’t new, it was just Microsoft-based, and they could have done so much more.

In the next two posts I’ll dive into why this is a problem and what I think they could have done instead.

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