Platform politics is a hot area right now. I made a previous post about how much time I spend in a day switching from platform to platform from call to call. For me, it is not dissimilar to switching telecom providers when you roam. But no one has been forced to choose telecom providers when roaming. Yet. But it is an interesting analogy as someone pays for the privilege of communication. How much of our conversations are driven by who is actually paying the bill?
In an early morning discussion where we were supposed to be on one concall platform, we got urgently switched to another one for commercial reasons on why the conversation is going to be recorded and consumed.
I know of another organisation where an internal battle came about when an external contractor who uses Teams on multiple domains (as I do) got tired of concalls exclusively on Teams as they had it set up for their primary domain and had problems switching all the time.
We do focus too much on the platform and not enough on the content shared on the platform. The platform should be seamless and unobtrusive. But too many battles lurk at the platform level, not only for functionality but for control.
So when can we become platform neutral? We already make decisions on personal device choices and laptop preferences. Why so much effort to connect? Content management is not such at big deal in this day and age. We can watermark, encrypt and do other activities to protect. We’ve learned to co-exist with Word and PDF, although I can still save in an open source format as well. Other media standards have evolved, although not that quickly. MP4, JPEG, all good means of exchange. But ideas over a platform, not so easy.
I am truly puzzled how hard video communications seems to be for so many. Or how politicized. We conquered standard voice management, when can we conquer video concalls?