WebRTC's Job to be Done

I've been introduced to the "Jobs to be done" concept by Horace Dediu from Asymco. He tried explaining it lately when discussing wearable technology:

"The reason a product deserves to exist is that it can do a job that needs doing and that few, if any others can also do it. This happens when the job is unstated and difficult to perceive. Put another way, the difficulty behind jobs-to-be-done based design is that jobs are never plainly evident. In contradiction to invention, where the problem being solved must be as clearly stated as its solution, value-creating innovation meets new and unarticulated needs. Even when created, the value is more subtly perceived, often only after prolonged use."

I think that a lot of the UC vendors out there miss the job to be done that WebRTC comes to solve: it has nothing to do with the ability to replace face-to-face meetings and has everything to do with removing the barriers of using video technologies.

When a UC vendor works on his next release, there are several things he will focus on. The ones usually on his plate:

• Improving voice quality and echo cancellation algorithms
  
  
• Adding some more devices to the interoperability list
  
  
• Adding a new codec or two, so his spec sheet looks more formidable
  
  
• Reduce BOM cost or increase ports count (i.e - pack more power)
  
  
• Try to add features based on the additional power he has:
  • Increasing resolutions and frame rate for video
  • Increase the maximum number of participants in a video conference
  • Enable continuous video, and later on encoder per participant

Essentially, it will all be around bringing better quality into the solution.

And I can tell you, with most systems today, most employees at a company are clueless as to how to operate them video room meetings - things like multiple remote controls, closed TV sets or hard to reach projectors, connectivity issues, dialing misconfigurations - I saw everything. Somehow, UC vendors are aware of it, but haven't really found a way to solve it AND get their end customers to deploy it in that manner.

WebRTC, on the other hand, doesn't really care about these issues. Sure - it solves some of them, and provides good enough quality that is comparable to most enterprise grade solutions out there - but that isn't the job to be done that I think it has.

WebRTC is about removing the barriers of using video technologies. Here are a few of them that just got vaporized with WebRTC:

• Having to develop codec, media and network transport is hard work. It used to require teams of upwards of 10 engineers, which now require four or less.
  
  
• It is integrated into browsers, making interoperability a non-issue: with so little number of browsers, most services can treat the browser as the "device" or the element requiring interoperability and the rest is just their own closed garden.
  
  
• It is free to develop with. If you want to do the same with traditional solutions, besides the need to license the technologies there were royalties and patents involved, placing the cost of running a system anywhere between 10 cents to a couple of dollars per port - think how that affects OTT's out there with tens of millions of users or more.
  
  
• Its APIs are JavaScript, a language that is more accessible than anything that came before it for media processing tech.

These aspects of WebRTC reduce most barriers that existed before it for people to create new video calling services, and you see that reflected in the types of companies and the make of the teams that are working on such solutions.

How will that affect UC vendors? It will be disruption coming from below. Today, there are those that discard WebRTC as being just a technology, trying to compare it with fully fledged solutions to state its uselessness. What they miss is that by yielding it, new entrants can wreak havoc in the current ecosystem and value chain of UC.

The one vendor that did anything sensible about it so far was Vidyo by aligning their technology with Google's WebRTC. If they will be able to change their business models to accommodate to the changing ecosystem, they will shine.

Where are the rest of the UC vendors? How do they plan on defining their jobs to be done in this brave new world?