But they certainly have a number of misses as well. They often let competitors get a big head start and then quickly overtake the competitor with their sales, marketing, and bundling prowess. LiveMeeting seems, so far, to be a miss rather than a hit.
While by no means perfect, I prefer netmeeting to Placeware, Live Meeting, WebEx, or Breeze. All of those solutions are more slick than netmeeting but I’ve been in many meetings where far too much time is spent getting every location set up on the service and not enough time is spent on the content needing to be discussed. They can all be used well but I’ve just not found it be the norm.
As an aside, this leads me to the other pet peave with all of these solutions – they seem to encourage the use of bad power point presentations. PPT can be great but so often I find presentation slides with 50+ words on the screen, lots of bad animation, etc. It can be a powerful tool or it can be a tremendous crutch that does nothing more than insult the intelligence of the audience and saps the life out of any discussion. The fact that Live Meeting, Web ex, Breeze, etc exist seems to encourage people to create a presentation for every meeting. Why?
