To paraphrase Seth Godin, WebRTC is about breaking things.
Seth Godin (who you should definitely read) had an interesting post this week, titled Abandoning perfection. It is short so go over and read it. I’ll just put one of the paragraphs of this post here, to serve as my context:
Perfect is the ideal defense mechanism, the work of Pressfield’s Resistance, the lizard brain giving you an out. Perfect lets you stall, ask more questions, do more reviews, dumb it down, safe it up and generally avoid doing anything that might fail (or anything important).
Now that we have it here, why don’t we check on the excuses people (and companies) give for not using WebRTC?
- “Microsoft and Apple don’t support it”
- Do you have any better idea on how to do video calling in browsers? Because I don’t
- And there are WebRTC plugins for those who want them in Safari and IE
- There are also those who can live with Chrome and Firefox use cases only
- “You can’t do multiparty calls with it”
- This is true for any client side VoIP solution. They require a server
- And since WebRTC is a technology, it is up to you to come up with the solution and implement server side multiparty
- Join my webinar next week with TokBox on this subject while you’re at it…
- “There’s no quality of service”
- No VoIP service has quality of service
- WebRTC changes nothing in this regard
- And people are still happy to use Skype (!) for their business meetings
- “Without signaling, it can’t interoperate with anything else”
- True. WebRTC comes without signaling
- Which means you can add your own – SIP, XMPP or anything you fancy. To fit your exact need and use case
- In many cases, interoperability is overrated anyway, and building your own service silo is good enough
- “Mobile First, iOS First. Apple not there, so no way I can use WebRTC”
- You’ll be surprised how many commercial iOS production apps there are that use WebRTC
- That’s why I even published a report on WebRTC adoption in mobile apps
Got a lizard brain? Make sure you use the excuses above in the next weekly meeting with your boss. Want to break things and be useful? Check out what WebRTC can do for you.
Oh, and when someone tells you that WebRTC isn’t ready for prime time yet, but will be in 2-3 years – and a lot sooner than you expect – tell him it is ready. Today.
I’ve seen companies using WebRTC daily – in ways that advances their business – adding more flexibility – enabling them to make better decisions – lowers their costs – or allow them to exist in the first place.
Got a good use case that requires real time communications? First check if WebRTC fits your needs – REALLY check. 80% or more of the time – it will.