October 12, 2005
WebEx and Live Meeting absolved of guilt, charged as an accessory
In the world of tech marketing, you see a lot of software demos. A lot. Sometimes, it's your product being demonstrated; sometimes it's some other company demonstrating software to you. And more and more, these demos take place over the Web, through interactive meeting spaces. Online meetings. Whatever you want to call them.Generally, these online affairs fall into two camps: WebEx and Live Meeting. Yes, yes, I realize that there are a plethora of other options out there for hosting online meetings (Adobe / Macromedia Breeze, for example), and no doubt some of those companies will flock to the site screaming "heathen" and "heresy." If I'm lucky, they may even choose to highlight the superiority of their solution in the comments, below. (Please do. The products are not my concern.)
But, per usual, I digress.
Inevitably, I'm sitting in a large meeting room as I sit through these demos, a sickly pang of dread gnawing at my gut. On my right, sits Mr. Live Meeting and on my left, Mr. WebEx. Both full of ego and confidence for their chosen solutions. Both, like renegades from Highlander inexorably convinced that "There can be only one." Both assault me with huffs of disdain, buffeting my hair with their exuberant scoffing. "That wouldn't have happened," they say. "If you were using [insert favorite online meeting product here]!"
And there was a time when I would have agreed with them. Back near the turn of the century, I was working for a company that was a fairly heavy WebEx user. And it would crash. It would hang. It would black out. And we would complain complain complain.
"This demo is horrible," we would say. "Can't someone present a decent software demo online?"
But, slowly, surely, the technology got better. The bandwidth became more abundant. The platforms became more resilient. Our reply?
"This demo is horrible," we would say. "Can't someone present a decent software demo online?"
But, you see, gentle reader, there is the kernel, the glimmer, the faint hint of understanding that the errors, the disdain, the mediocrity of the demo lay not in the presentation format, but in the demo, itself. Because, truthfully, the software being demonstrated and the foundation used to host the demonstration were never truly the culprit. The culprit was, in fact, the software demo.
Software demos are horrible, by and large. They are very difficult to deliver and very difficult to target. The only feedback the demo-giver tends to receive are loose mutterings of disembodied voices, grunts of acknowledgment, nervous tittering giggle. And the demo-receiver is no better off. Lost in a blur of features and clicks that make little to no sense, they are generally unable to formulate intelligent questions beyond, "Could you go through that part again?"
When you have seen a good software demo, you know it. Flat out. It's obvious. I think. I can't say that I've ever seen one. I certainly know that I've never given a truly decent software demo myself. And I've demonstrated more pieces of software than I either care to, or actually can, remember.
I repeat: Software demos are horrible. Plain and simple. And yet, who gets the blame for them being horrible? The WebExs and Live Meetings of the world. Because they are the ones serving up the demos.
So now we get right down to it. And the truth of the matter is that the platforms, themselves, are fine. And truly, not all that different from one another, in this day and age. A bell here. A whistle there. It all comes out in the wash. The real question is: How do we make software demos better? Or more specifically, how do we teach people to give a decent software demo? And better yet, where would they learn those skills? And on the converse, how do we learn to be better audiences for software demos?
And there, my friend, is where the WebEx folks and Adobe / Macromedia folks and Live Meeting folks are missing a huge opportunity. You see: The only way for those companies to truly show the brilliance of their technology is to teach people how to give compelling demos.
Why aren't the doing that?
If one of them could teach me to demo... If one of them could give me a resource to send to people who try to show me demos... If one of them could teach me to coax a better demo out of a presenter... Then we would be talking.
Why aren't these online meeting companies supporting a portal for learning how to demo software? Why aren't they calling in the best presenters to give tips and tricks? Why aren't they funding blogs like Presentation Zen that actually help people become better at presenting what they're trying to present? Why are they satisfied to shoulder all the blame and let all of their products take the heat? Why don't they get out in front of the problem and fix what's really broken?
That would be doing something for the customer. And, given that all of the technology is rapidly becoming exactly the same, that would set them apart.
So that's what a blog entry looks like. If you click that little comment link below, it will spawn a new window. Spawn? Oh, it means open. Anyway, that new window will allow you type a comment about this post. Just type your name... ZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Technorati tags: WebEx, Livemeeting, Breeze, Demo
WebEx and Live Meeting absolved of guilt, charged as an accessory
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