Economists (of which I am one) have yet to develop a plausible explanation for why some networks develop and others don’t. Maybe you anthropoligists could take a shot?

(I should note that one reason videoconferencing has not yet gained the market share people have been predicting for it for more than a decade now is that, even done as well as it can be done, it still is not a particularly good substitite for face-to-face meetings. So there’s still a quality-of-experience threshhold that needs to be dealt with. At least that’s been my experience)

I’m quite certain telepresence is going to take off. It’s got far too many advantages not to. Here are the two that occur to me off-hand:

* Complete control of who people talk to and complete monitoring of what they say. No more coming home with disruptive or unpopular ideas from conferences.

* More hours worked. That time you used to spend in the hotel room, before and after training, getting what you’d learned grooved into your brain? Now you’ll spend it back on task. Too bad about that learning thing, but we can measure your hours, so that’s what we’ll manage.

I think videoconferencing is always there to bolster “making do” which is what all these distributed teams in corporations are being asked to do.

I’m also impressed with how much care both firms are putting into the details of the user experience in order to get it to some version of “right”: eye contact is maintained, lag is eliminated, spatial audio, high resolution video, all sort of technology tricks but aimed at trying to break through that awful void that we enter when we get on a conference call, etc. There’s just no reality, no relationship, and often silence and discomfort and eye-rolling, but the application of technology towards that goal is noble.

Does anyone talk on the phone on their iPhone? Because it sucks! You can’t hear the other person and you don’t know if you are being heard. Does anyone use a Blueooth headset? Because they suck, too. But we tolerate these mostly-failing user experiences that are about interacting with other people – potentially the most important use of all this technology – to connect people together over a range of distance in real time. But when it’s awful, what is the toll?

Agreed, the price makes it out of reach for almost everyone, but maybe that’s a business model issue. When there was on TV on the street, we went down the street to watch TV. When phones come out, there was one per town. Only recently is there one per person (and not in every part of the world). So we’re at early days of high-resolution high-fidelity interpersonal communication. And I think we need that very badly.

Look for someone to disruptively innovate this space for about 1% of what Cisco is charging.

There are entire web startup companies that operate in the cloud, out of cafés (literally) without offices at all. The question is not will Cisco’s Big Expensive Solution remove the need for air travel, it is that collective, collaged, collaborative tools will obviate the need for Big Expensive Solutions!