I was talking to an attorney at my train this morning, and he said they recently sealed a deal, after 10 months of work. This deal concerned Texas and Illinois, and they mainly worked by conference calls and emails. Because of that, he said, the time to negotiate took much longer than it should have. He said that people are much more willing to say "That's NOT acceptable! in an email, or even on a conference call, but in person, with eye contact, you're much more likely to figure it out.

I hadn't thought of that.

Which is why business travel is flourishing. You can get ten times as much done in one meeting than you can in a whole series of conference calls.

Nowadays the businesses that are "computer aware" use videoconferencing. I wonder if it's better, since participants can see one another?

I imagine videoconferencing is getting better. A few years ago I was at a university that had 2 campuses, and we videoconferenced between the two. The movement was in slow motion, and it just didn't seem real. Besides that, the camera can't be on everyone at once so you really don't get the same effect as a regular meeting.

I just logged into an internet conference Monday afternoon. It was so clunky and stilted! It took ages to log into the site, the video kept freezing, the audio cut out several times, and the PowerPoint slides were not in sync with the lecture. Since it was free anyway, we just logged off and went back to work after about 30 minutes. What a waste of time! Now, some of the problem was no doubt my own building's limitation (even though we have 3 T-1 lines our internet browsing becomes slow sometimes), but I also think it was a hardware problem at the source. I think they might have ended up with more traffic than their system could reliably handle.

I would much rather just have sent someone from our library to that conference, maybe gotten another speaker or three to make the travel worthwhile, and ended up with comprehensive notes from the lectures.

I taught a class once, a while back, where half the class was not in the room but watching on a live video feed. As I remember they used two dedicated ISDN lines and some special hardware compression. (This was about a decade ago.)

At my current job, we have meetings all the time with about half the people calling in. We don't really use video. We share the presenter's computer using something like VNC (virtual network computing) or Webex (which shares the desktop by using a web browser plugin). If that doesn't work, we often send the presentation slides out to all people involved who are calling in remotely (phone conferencing). Also, sometimes we use wiki software to share some information and talk about it. As many as half our team members call in because we have employees in Bangalore (now renamed Bengalooru), Colorado, or Prague. So, these are weekly meetings and presentations.

Looking at small, slow, jerky videos usually doesn't do much for a presentation. I don't really think it's much of a value added. at least in our case, where the information being exchanged is pretty abstract already.

I have also done webinars where my voice and the actions on my computer are recorded (and possibly edited) for broadcast later. That seems to work well for some demos and presentations.

Our office about a year ago installed (at great expense presumably) two videoconferencing suites and others were installed at four other offices across the country.

Within a couple of weeks they withdrew the facility as it wasn't working ptoperly. We've had occasional updates that they're still working on the problems, but it's still not operative. I have never seen any of the hardware so I've no idea what it is/was like.