Executive Summary

How can you be in two places at once when you re nowhere at all to begin with? The Firesign Theater

The rate of technical development in videoconferencing continues along a high-speed, zigzag trail. Over the past year, there have been twists and turns in the progress of video technology that few would have expected. The spread of wide area Ethernet, bandwidth logjams on cable modem networks, and interconnection logjams on digital subscriber lines (DSL) are just few of the business twists that the trail has taken in the past few months. The cliff-hanging saga of G3 wireless has shown clearly how the fate of major technological innovations are often held captive by a tangled web of politics, money, and business strategy.

Perhaps the most dramatic development has been a quiet one that has slipped under the radar of many business publications the growing integration of videoconferencing into the Web-based trend to e-business and e-commerce. When I am asked to predict the future of videoconferencing, usually by analysts and children, I usually say that it will soon become as commonplace as the telephone and the expense report. Unfortunately, I have been saying that since the dot matrix printer was considered hot stuff. To accurately predict the course of visual communications technology over the next few years may be impossible, particularly in the consumer realm. In that area it depends on too many nonlinear variables, such as the ability of carrier management to continue to invest heavily and effectively in universal broadband...