Dear Cisco, High Fidelity is Not Collaboration

Cisco sells video calling and video conferencing as “collaboration.” Not true. It’s a medium for communication. Communication is not collaboration. Here’s what their pitch looks like:

They are selling fidelity, approaching that 100% improvement in audio and video that helps you forget the medium – screens, microphones, speakers – separating you.

I love hi-fi in every form. Virtuality helps you “be there” when you are not. But video media aren’t collaboration, any more than using the telephone or paper postage. Using the medium isn’t collaboration.

Collaboration starts in shared intent. Collaboration is behavior, interpersonal and social. Collaboration shows up in our metawork (work about work). Collaboration is working together to define and pursue a common cause.

So until Cisco starts offering products that help you find collaborators, to build trust among yourselves, to negotiate how you want to work, to define common goals and language, to decompose and plan the work, to define the parts we need to do alone and together, to coordinate our schedules for the same-time activities, to work together on the same objects and to share our results… Until then, Cisco should stop advertising telepresence as “video collaboration.”

It devalues the term. It makes Cisco out to be misleading and incompetent.

When dictators block the Internet and phone networks, the revolutionaries of 2011 work with each other by fax and on foot and with memory sticks. Branding your better conference call as “collaboration” is lame.

Sell the value of high fidelity at work.

That’s plenty.