The Telepresence myth

I picked up this Dilbert from the Cisco CTO's twitter feed. It is a humorous take on video conferencing which Cisco has renamed Telepresence. Video conferencing failed to become a saturation technology and was limited to a niche market. Telepresence will be no different as it is video conferencing in a different and more expensive guise and it is a myth to expect it to replace the jet plane.

If video conferencing is to suceed it must be made cheaper and not more expensive and as such, Telepresence misses the boat. It is the credit crunch, people, more equipment expense and greater bandwidth costs cannot translate to greater cost efficiencies. (Unless you swallow the marketing bull, hook, line and sinker!) If memory served me right Ethernet clobbered Token-ring because it was cheaper and thus the path to collaboration nirvana should be with technologies that cost less.

Video conferencing cartoons are far and few between, mainly because it's reach is limited. Telepresence is appropriate for cartoons as its a joke.