Does WebRTC need a change in governance?
Is it time to change the governance of WebRTC in order to keep it growing and flourishing?
Read MoreWhen Mary publishes on SlideShare, millions follow.
Mary Meeker of KPCB had just released her mid year free analysis of internet trends. All 196 pages of it. At the time of writing, there are over 1.6 million views (!) reported on this deck. There are many gold nuggets in there and stats for those in love with numbers. Jett Mall of Unify does a good job at analyzing the impact of these trends on UC. I want to do the same for WebRTC. The tidbits I'll share here don't tell a coherent story as they are sorted by way of appearance in the slide deck.
In a recent analysis I did on the 600+ WebRTC vendors that I follow, it was interesting to see that the two more notable verticals are education and healthcare. These are two of the verticals where the Internet impact to date hasn't been big enough yet. Will WebRTC improve that? Probably yes.
With the new Buy buttons being added to ads, it is not hard to imagine sales oriented contact centers attempting to get people into a conversation before landing on their website - via an ad. This hasn't happened yet, which to me is surprising.
Most WebRTC services today that have video calling support in them are focused mostly on the traditional horizontal viewing. Should developers start working on "vertical-first" user experiences and not only mobile first ones?
While the trend is to go self-service in support and contact centers, it will be hard to cancel the human touch required. WebRTC in contact centers today enable removing the brick and mortar part of it and enable agents to work from anywhere - something that was impossible/limited before.
Check out slides 46 to 56. Search for Unified Communications, Voice, Video. You won't find it. And yet, they are winning the world. And yes. They have voice and video. Oftentimes, curtsey of WebRTC.
Note 4 key factors here:
In many cases, WebRTC in India was all about companies in India developing services to be used in the US and Europe.
Today, there is a growing trend of Indian vendors developing services for local markets in India, using WebRTC in the process. There are two main challenges here:
There's an opportunity here, but it will mostly be mobile (check slide 169 in the deck).
As for China, I have less visibility there.
The best teams I've seen using WebRTC are those that aren't VoIP developers in their vocation and calling. They come from a specific vertical. They know it in depth. And they are trying to find new technical solutions to it. WebRTC is means to an end for them - a small piece of a larger puzzle.
Is it time to change the governance of WebRTC in order to keep it growing and flourishing?
Read MoreRTC@Scale is Facebook’s virtual WebRTC event, covering current and future topics. Here’s the summary for RTC@Scale 2024 so you can pick and choose the relevant ones for you.
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