Google’s announcement that its futuristic Project Starline videoconferencing booth will come with a price tag “comparable to a car” feels like a moment pulled straight from the Cisco Telepresence playbook. Remember that? Launched with fanfare, bathed in executive glow, and priced to match a luxury sedan. Cisco’s Telepresence solution promised life-sized clarity and a meeting-room revolution. But instead of disrupting corporate communication, it mostly disrupted budget forecasts and ended up being more showroom sizzle than boardroom staple.
Now here comes Google, touting hyper-realistic, 3D-lightfield video calling in a dedicated booth. On paper, the idea reads like sci-fi turned startup pitch deck—until you realize this isn’t a new story. We’ve heard it before.
Back in the late 2000s and early 2010s, I wrote about the Telepresence trend as it ballooned into corporate theater. At the time, Cisco had grand visions of remote collaboration, complete with synchronized lighting and dedicated fiber lines (Cisco and Telepresence). But for all its polish, Telepresence became a symbol of technological overreach—an elegant answer to a problem most businesses were solving with webcams and software.
Fast-forward to 2025, and HP’s re-entry into the video space—via rebranded Poly gear—only further highlights how little has changed. It’s not reinvention, it’s recycling. Poly itself was cobbled from pieces of Plantronics and Polycom, and while solid in the enterprise audio-video space, it’s never been known for innovation on the scale that truly disrupts markets (Chime and the crowded space).
So what makes Google’s Project Starline different? Not much, if we go by history. Dedicated booths have always struggled with scale. They’re space-bound, cost-heavy, and culturally awkward in a world increasingly comfortable with working from the couch in gym clothes.
Instead of booths that cost as much as a Tesla, innovation needs to focus on software, interoperability, and AI-driven context awareness—areas where services like Zoom, Teams, and even Amazon Chime are already pushing ahead.
Project Starline may be impressive technically. But practically? It risks becoming another museum piece in the long history of videoconferencing’s “next big thing” hype cycle. Just ask Cisco. Or HP.