WebRTC Infographic: Are we at a Tipping Point?
Most probably yes.
In the last couple of weeks I've been working with people from the AT&T Developer Program on an Infographic. The idea behind it was to show the progress that WebRTC made in the past couple of years, trying to understand if it is time for people to join in. If you have been following me, you know that my answer is "start yesterday" when it comes to WebRTC.
The result is the WebRTC Infographic below:
Tsahi Levent-Levi
Independent WebRTC analyst. I help companies ship real-time communications they can actually monitor. 20+ years in the comms space, last 13 focused on WebRTC.
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So what about the Enterprise ?
What share is still stuck on IE ?
How many are using Chrome now but need support for plugins for some of their existing applications ? Because Chrome is getting rid of the plugin-API soon. So are they going to back to using IE ?
Haven't seen many deploy Firefox in the Enterprise, because supposedly it's harder to manage, especially in a we-deploy-and-configure-with-group-policy Windows environment.
When is Microsoft going to deliver ORTC in IE ? It is still marked as 'in development':
http://dev.modern.ie/platform/status/webrtcobjectrtcapi
So clearly not when Windows 10 is released.
How similar to WebRTC API the ORTC API ? Is it going to be easy to adapt it to existing applications ? I know they were working on a shim, what is the status of that ?
Maybe if Chrome gets rid of plugin-support it's a chance for Opera to conquer the Enterprise ? :-)
Lennie - so many questions... no place in an Infographic to answer them all. You'll need to follow and read my blog for that (and I know that you already do).
Seriously, IE is important, but not mandatory for WebRTC to flourish. I've seen many vendors gain commercial advantages from using it within their business TODAY.
Sorry for the many questions.
Basically, just wondering if you know the current state of businesses and the bigger Enterprise environments is it still using many legacy systems based around plugins or worse ?: IE.
Newer Windows is going to include Edge and IE if I understand correctly, so clearly Microsoft thinks that businesses still depends on legacy systems.
Seems to me WebRTC/ORTC support in Edge won't be ready for Windows 10 release.
Microsoft said they wanted to update their browser independently from Windows (when they said that they mentioned IE, but that was before they announced Edge).
Now I assume they have the infrastructure in place to be able to do that with Edge, what do you think ?
Otherwise we'll be waiting for Windows 11 before you get WebRTC/ORTC.
Many businesses are dependent on IE and Windows, while others less so. With the current trend in some enterprises and the education vertical to migrate towards Chromebooks, there's a need for enterprises to make the migration to modern systems and cut their dependence on IE anyway.