Webinar Wire

Limitations Frustrate Webinar Users

Posted by Ken Molay November 12 2007 1:38 PM EDT

3 comments

A while back, I watched a public webinar given by a well known industry guru. At one point in the presentation he said, "My next slide was corrupted by the web conferencing vendor, so I'll describe it to you." I thought that his choice of words and something about his tone indicated a deeper story there, so I wrote him a note and asked what had happened. He called me back less than an hour after the event ended. I guess he needed somebody as a relief valve who understood what he was talking about, because he launched into a passionate diatribe against web conferencing in general, and vendors he had worked with in particular.

"I hate giving these web seminars. I hate the level of bureaucratic doublespeak and lying by the vendors on a regular basis. I use a Macintosh. I ask these guys if their software works on a Mac and they are trained never to say No. It's never their fault when it doesn't work… It's always something about my configuration. Maybe it's your version of Safari, or your version of the operating system. Hey... I have a standard Mac with the standard operating system and browser that comes from the manufacturer. Nothing fancy here. If your software doesn't work with it, it's your fault, not mine."

I asked him about the slide problem he had and whether it was related to Macintosh problems. "No! I used a PC just so I could do the presentation. Then when I went through the presentation to check everything in our pre-event session I found that this slide came up with an alert related to something about Quicktime or JPG format. I said it worked fine when I viewed it on my machine and was told: Must be something wrong with your PowerPoint. So I said I would swap in a new version of the slide without that image. Oh no, you can't swap in a new slide 15 minutes before the event. In other words, their software had the restrictions, but I was the one who was going to look bad."

Notice that he turned specific problems with specific vendors into a general antipathy towards the entire idea of webinars. Web conferencing for public events is designed to be a public communication and interaction medium. If it doesn't work on the hardware and software that presenters and audiences already have in place, they are unlikely to change their systems. They are more likely to discard your application. And in the process, they will elect to avoid the entire problem the next time they need to find a way to communicate.

Building applications that are full-featured and work on every possible operating system and configuration is probably impossible. But that's the expectation of our customer base. They don't want excuses and they don't want limitations... they want to concentrate on their message content and forget about the underlying technology. The long term winners in web event technology are going to have to find a way to satisfy an ever more heterogeneous client population.

There are some interesting comments flying back and forth on Michael Fitzpatrick's "Killer Features" post that touch on the idea of access being a feature in itself. This kind of dialog between vendors, service providers, and customers is exactly what the industry needs and I encourage you to join in with a comment or post describing your views.