Every conference call I’m on … I really think it is every one … has issues. We can’t hear you. Can the person whose dog is barking go on mute? We’re seeing a screen, but it’s not a screen that appears relevant. Wait, I need a therapeutic reboot. We still can’t see your screen. Can everyone go on mute there’s a lot of background noise. What did you say/ say that again? I didn’t hear anything after holy crap, can you say everything again after holy crap? Ok, I can almost hear you, I’m getting about every fourth packet. I give up, I’m going to hang up and dial in again, I hope that’s better. Or what I just did on a call: silently hang up and fail to dial back in, it just wasn’t worth it.
Individual calls – just two people – are not far behind in quality. They’re just poor quality most of the time. I long for the good old days. Yes, my phone wasn’t in my pocket, but every time you picked up the phone, it worked, and it was high quality. btw I get pretty good service from Skype, of all things, it usually works pretty well. However now that it has been acquired by Microsoft I’m not expecting great things going forward. We’ll get more features and poorer quality.
Collaboration between people in far flung locales requires excellent voice, screen share and video capabilities. We just don’t seem to have that – not even close. I hope one day these facilities improve. Building great things requires seamless collaboration.