I sat through a demo today with some folks from Macromedia about their new Flash based Breeze VoIP powered web conferencing application. While a lot of what I saw was not what I would call breakthrough, it will put a lot of pressure on the WebEx market and Microsoft’s Live Office efforts to do better.
In fairness to Macromedia I did the demo on the Powerbook and it’s not really Mac ready, something they apologized for so I’m hopeful to be able to do another demo on a PC later this week. That said, some of the points they made were the same I heard years back from folks at Intervu and even Real and Microsoft as reasons why streaming media based web voice conferencing would be important to the market. Substitute VoIP for streaming and you’ve likely heard the story. Raindance made many of the same comments a few years back, but despite all that there was something rather easy about Breeze and how fast things could be done and how nice the images and text were presented. I’ve sat through many a CCBN based shareholder demo and live conference of earnings calls and know that this was indeed, pardon the pun, a breeze compared to what they have to offer today.
But with Skype likely heading in the Video direction, and other client software on the market such as eyeBeam from XTEN, one has to wonder just how easy it will be in the conferencing space to gain traction at .32 cents per minute.
AT&T has also said as recently as the Internet Telephony conference that they have a very powerful voice conferencing platform in place that will work with CallVantage offering some features that add a real conference table experiences to the VoIP universe.
Overall I’m happy to see where Macromedia is going because as one of their presenters pointed out, service providers need more than price to have a sold VoIP offering, but something in the back of my mind makes me ask how committed Adobe will be to this application post merger. Adobe is all about making the print realm look better in digital. Flash does that, as do other Macromedia tools that are geared for the Web and for presentations, but this seems a stretch and without some better non-message point answers from Macromedia this will have to be determined down the road. Otherwise like a spring breeze, this application can be forgotten when something else reigns on their parade, for these days in our era of pop tart, minute rice oriented products and services what was hot today is, well blown away in the breeze tomorrow.