Max: 00:08 Hi. I’m Max Clark. Microsoft Teams did something incredible, and it’s a testament to Microsoft’s legacy and lineage as a software manufacturer with a partner ecosystem. And so what they do with Microsoft Teams is they created a software stack for their physical endpoints that they control. So if you look at it and you go and you buy a Microsoft room device, anything that connects to Microsoft Teams, what you’re experiencing is you’re experiencing harbor made by the manufacturer and the software made by Microsoft.
Max: 00:32 Microsoft controls the interface for teams across all of their clients so if you’re using teams on the desktop it’s gonna look the same way as teams on the phone why is that Microsoft built it Microsoft controls it this is very different from every other we’ll use the Gartner term every other you cast company on the market if you are using RingCentral 8 by 8 dial pad zoom go down the list of these companies and if you buy a physical endpoint you buy a physical phone or a conference room device your experience with that device is whatever software is implemented by that phone manufacturer so you’re getting a Polycom interface you’re getting a Yealink interface you’re getting a Snom interface you’re getting a Grandstream interface and there’s a very loose connection between that you can experience and the actual phone right now this gets extremely frustrating when we start talking about the legacy phone manufacturers and their transition from on premise equipment to some sort of cloud device Cisco Cisco manufactures their phones why is the experience on the phone different from the soft phone on the computer why are these such different experiences what I might tell I might tell actually tried to buy poly or polycom and couldn’t and might tell you know actually might tell exited the entire cloud business in a very strange way Avaya Avaya came out with a phone which was a 7 or 8 inch diagonal TFT screen running Android and when this phone was released it was I mean for a nerd like me it was incredibly exciting because now all of a sudden Avaya could deliver the same softphone a unified experience for their softphone from a PC from a Mac from a mobile device whatever it is down to the phone and the user can see the same interface and it looks the same.
Max: 02:22 And then, of course, Avaya ships this device. I have one over here on my on my table. Avaya ships this device and then implements a clone of their physical phone previous stack. I I mean, you take a beautiful color screen and you put it on this either and then you give it an interface, you know, that looks like it came out of 2005. And you’re just like, this company is gonna go under short the stock immediately.
Max: 02:43 And I find this to be one of those. It’s a missed opportunity but it’s also really a signal on focus on the user experience and and what kind of user experience these companies are driving and are paying attention to if you are not focused on and paying attention to the user experience end to end everywhere that users gonna interact with your service what is the quality of your service and was the quality of that user experience supposed to be and a lot of these UCaaS platforms are trying to push you know a transition away from a physical endpoint and onto just softphones. And this expectation that everybody’s just gonna have a Bluetooth headset or some sort of USB powered, you know, some sort of headset on and interacting with a softphone on this device you know on their on their laptop all the time and then a lot of places that work but there’s lots of places where that just doesn’t work first off it’s a convenience thing when you sit down at a desk and there’s a physical device on your desk that device can ring or you can make calls or you can pick it up and you can interact with it it’s a really nice experience Wall Street Journal had an article I saved it actually need to frame it and the headline of the article something like it has a million buttons and I don’t know what any of them do and and and it was a professor at the university’s quote and it wasn’t just a math or computer science professor or something.
Max: 03:54 So I mean it was even more absurd when you actually put it into context. And this professor had taken the phone off off their desk and put it into their drawer of their desk and just refused to use it and the complaint was is I can’t figure out how to navigate or use the interface and I mean it’s comical but it really kind of it really shows the issue that an enterprise has to deal with when you are talking about rolling out some sort of platform at scale. If you’re rolling out a platform to an SMB, you know, you have less than a 100 users. You can go touch each user and sit down with them and explain them how the platform works and answer questions and make sure that they’re using it and all these different things. You can accomplish that.
Max: 04:31 Now scale it up to a 1000 people. It takes a while to go touch each one of those people, especially because you have different times and people are in the office at different times. And now you have to talk about resourcing and how big is your team that can actually go out and do that. Now multiply this again, make it 5,000 people, make it 10,000 people cross being a put this across 10 different physical locations these things get harder and harder and harder so having a consistent user experience that is familiar across whatever device that the users interacting with becomes a huge differentiation in adoption ease of use satisfaction you know use whatever metric that you want to express this in and language that actually makes sense to you and it’s incredible to me that this hasn’t been addressed or focused on in any really meaningful way especially as we talk about the handset manufacturers and the conference room device I mean conferencing is incredible you know the most popular conference platforms on the market you need a cheat sheet to figure out how to work them I mean walk into a conference room at any office building and you’re gonna find hardware with instruction manual on like how to join a conference off that device this is not the experience that we should be giving our users in today’s world it’s a huge miss, and it’s something that I would love to see changed.
Max: 05:42 And I’m hoping at some point and at this point, who’s got enough juice? I don’t know. Maybe RingCentral is gonna go buy a hardware man. I don’t think RingCentral actually is gonna buy a hardware manufacturer. Maybe Zoom has enough juice where they can push their experience onto the endpoint and copy what Microsoft Teams has done.
Max: 05:55 You know, they do it to some degree with conferencing. Maybe they do it with phones. Zoom, if you’re listening, do this to your phones. You know? As these platforms like Ericsson has acquired Vonage, you know, is Ericsson gonna release and integrate a hardware with a software interface and make a common experience?
Max: 06:09 I don’t know. We we haven’t seen anything to to suggest it and be really nice Ericsson this is something you should do it’d be a big differentiator be really nice I don’t expect Mitel or Avaya to do it why because they decided to get completely out of this business in the first place if you’ve got an on premise Avaya platform Avaya’s plan for you at this point is to make you a RingCentral customer that they’re reselling Avaya’s implemented their infrastructure on top of recent RingCentral and are migrating people to RingCentral effectively. You know, Mitel Mitel did this even stranger where they didn’t even bother to implement their stack on top of RingCentral. They just said, hey. We’re a referral partner to RingCentral now.
Max: 06:43 So if you have an on premise Mitel system and you wanna stay in the Mitel ecosystem, there’s no migration path for you. You’re just on an island, and then at some point, you’re gonna switch to something else. It’s incredibly disjointed. It makes no sense. There are lots of issues with Microsoft Teams.
Max: 06:57 I’m not gonna say Microsoft Teams is a perfect platform by any stretch of the imagination. There are a lot of things that it does not do that make absolutely no sense in today’s world. Case in point, text messaging. Why is text messaging and SMS not a native integrated feature with Microsoft Teams if you voice enable it? I don’t know.
Max: 07:11 Like, maybe by the time you’re watching this video, they do it. Who knows? As of right now, if you want to SMS enable Microsoft Teams, you have to pay for an app, a new app integration on top of Microsoft Teams, which works great on desktop. But then on your cell phone, you have to run the app separately because you can’t run apps inside of the team’s client on a cell phone. You know, this stuff is is crazy.
Max: 07:29 It’s like, who owns the product and the product directions for these companies? And why is there not a product owner that can care and do this stuff end to end? So if you’ve struggled with this, you’re I mean, you’re absolutely right. You know, the answer is this is just join it. You know, there’s no right answer here.
Max: 07:43 You know, it’s just we’re dealing with trade offs now. You know, what is the best trade off for you? And how does that get implemented? And what functionality do you need? And what do you currently have?
Max: 07:51 You know, we get into these kind of conversations and that then drives it. You know, do you need a physical device on the desk? Some people want them. Some people don’t want them. I mean, it almost becomes like a person by person thing inside of an organization.
Max: 08:01 But if you’ve got break rooms, if you’ve got touchdown stations, if you’ve got hot desking, if you have any sort of warehousing, if you’ve got a hospital, guess what? You’ve got physical devices in your areas because you have to because you have to have, you know, telephony and collaboration available at those locations. There you are. And what does that experience look like for users? And how is it consistent?
Max: 08:19 And is it giving you what you actually need and want? I’d love to hear your comments on this and what your thoughts are. Let me know in the comments below. I’m Max Clark. Talk to you soon.
