Roger,

There’s cost associated with any action you ask a user to do. That’s why Whatsapp has been so successful in passing companies like Skype – it didn’t require people to build a buddy list in order to use it – it depended on the address book you already had on your phone.

The same thinking goes for many use cases. A store trying to capture a customer on its website won’t ask him to install a plugin – it will nudge him for a call directly. The less the potential customer has to think, the better it is for the seller.

To top it off, your thinking is deeply rooted in looking at communication as a service. It is not. It is a feature within another service. Embedding it into a workflow and a service on the web is rather impossible without something like WebRTC embedded within the browser.

I have been looking your posts since last autumn as I am intersted in WebRTC. I see the drive of WebRTC comes from two aspects: from server side, WebRTC is a simple stack/solution to deploy video service; from client side, no need to install client or plugin.

However, the drive from client side seems not strong enough, as it is just one time effort for end user to install plugin, isn’t it?

I think the drive from client side is not strong enough so that we don’t see the highly and quickly adoption of WebRTC in more large scale.

Roger

Laurence,

I am not really sure, but what is it that you do today out of the browser? Office has moved to the browser (or at least starting to move there). All that’s left now is “Skype”.