2024 Review

Dave and David discuss and reflect on 2024. 

Transcript

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Welcome to Talking Heads, the informative, entertaining, and brilliant podcast on enterprise communications from the team at Talking Points. Greetings, everybody. Welcome to the latest and probably the last Talking Points Chats of the year in, 2024. I'm here with my partner, Dave Michaels. Say hi to you. You had me worried there when you said the last one, but of the year. Yes. Okay. I'll do that. The last one of 2024. There's a you know, I've been souring on predictions. You know, I used to write a predictions article every year probably for the last 20, 25 years or so in the industry. You know, I predicted that you would sour on predictions. There you go. I got a lot of them right, by the way. I'm very proud of that. But you know what? Things are moving so fast, things that we're unaware of, you know, AI, all the rest of the You you you kinda completely wrong, David, that the the the reason I'm souring on predictions is because things move so slow. I mean, the the the predictions this year are the same as they were last year, so it's the it's the same number before. Oh, you know, we're we're we're going into year 3 of Gen AI. Guess what the prediction is? Gen AI is gonna be big. I mean, this thing is so slow. Yes. Okay. So it's too fast and it's too slow, but for whatever reason, we're not gonna do predictions this year. We're gonna break from the mold as we always do. We should have done another Mystery Science Theater version. But, anyway, we're gonna break from the mold, and what we're gonna do is talk about what we've experienced this year and some of the bigger stories that you may not remember that you might wanna think about. So I have this list of about 40 of them. We'll probably get to 3, but I think you just talked about the first one already, Dave. Right? You talked about AI. UC is the letter u and the letter c, but I think this year, the UC became the letter a and the letter I. If you're not doing AI and UC, you were left behind. And, again, I can't I'm still not sure how much of that is real versus hype. And there's were some interesting things, but but, oh, generally, what are you thinking about AI this year that you weren't thinking last year? I'm sorry. Were you talking to me? Yes. I I kinda just kinda fall asleep and tune out when people start talking AI all the time. So, the the the basic problem is that it is indeed interesting stuff and it is indeed potentially disruptive. We haven't got there yet and so everyone's kinda waiting for that to happen. But, it's amazing to me how much the industry has pivoted to it and talks about it. You know, a great example is the contact center. Right? To be a a CCaaS provider requires you know, we can argue about this all day. It requires 20 or 30 key core competencies. Right? To to really be good at at being a CCaaS provider, you have to have this money. I'll just say it that. This money, core competencies, but they only talk about 1. And every vendor is only talking about 1. And and what's happening as a result of that is that other vendors that only do one thing such as AI, really even talk about the rest of the stuff and so the it's getting it's getting to be instead of 20 CCaaS providers we're talking about, we're all of a sudden talking about a 100 CCaaS or CX providers, and they all do AI really well. And it's like, well, wait a minute. What about what about the ACD? What about WFO? What about all these other things? No one's talking about that. And so it's just getting really confusing for the customers. So we saw this year, Zoom dropped video from their name, and that's, I'm sure, directly because of AI. We saw this year even say they dropped video from Zoomtopia. Yeah. Exactly. We did say that. We had to do a fake Zoomtopia if you ask you don't remember that, in order to get some things that we were interested in. We saw Microsoft release a gazillion copilots except for the one that they're doing in Teams because for some reason, they call that one biz chat. Don't know why. Doesn't make sense, but Copilot. We did see them come up with these, online agents, which is, you know, agents living in the system that could do cool things like simultaneous translation in your voice and stuff. That's cool. We saw this new word cover your ears. I know it's gonna upset you, Dave. With with this new word agentic, we're now gonna be talking about agentic from you know, it's a are you agentic? Of course, I'm agentic. Look. Just look under my shirt. You know, it means nothing to anyone, but now it's I I I want for the record because because I don't like the word, I decided to go see what it actually meant to look it up in the dictionary. And guess what? It's not in the dictionary. Not in the dictionary. Exactly. Okay. We did see at Webex 1, we saw an agent or an agent agent, an agent agent, I don't know, speaking in plain language, able to turn on a dime. That was exciting. It's not released yet, but we did see it. We saw one from 59. We saw one from Talkdesk. We, you know, we saw a bunch from Microsoft at Ignite, although they weren't really contact center agentics. But and Google's released a bunch I mean, it's the new thing, as I wrote about on no jitter. It's actually kind of an old thing because the way they're actually being used is pretty simple. So so the cost to the customer, they're not a new thing. From, from behind the scenes and what's happening, incredible. Alright. So so the summary around it and and the last piece we have to say is just as we're starting to record this, we're starting to see versions of I will make a video from your text thing pop up. You know, Google just released their next version, and and and I love the tagline that they had on theirs, which was basically all video from text sucks and are sucks less. That that was essentially what they said. You could boil it down, but that was really it. But but let's talk about the the non story stories, which are there's still no ROI and nothing that you can prove, and you can't really tell if people are liking it or disliking it because there are stats that go in both directions. There's drama. It's like a freaking Peyton Place going on right now. You know, at OpenAI and who's got board seats and Microsoft does and they don't and this and that and everybody's afraid of everything. And then and who's, who who who's been murdered, and and who's resigned from the board? And, I mean, it's just, it's just oh my god. It's the controversy is just unbelievable. Unbelievable. And then we're firing back up nuclear power plants and burying data centers underwater to give them power and keep them cool because we don't have enough processing power. And then the last piece of this was somebody said that, Google's quantum computing discovered parallel universes. Yes. So and I don't you know, at this point, it's very hard for me as a data science guy to separate a science fact from science fiction. I have my my star Trek communicator here somewhere. I could ask Scotty or somebody, but but I think it's still more of an open question than a closed one. If you're getting value The thing is with all this AI stuff, and and it's and I and I get it. And every once in a while, I have an AI experience that just blows my mind. It's like, this is really amazing stuff.

But so much of it is unreliable and so much of it is unpredictable that it's it's kind of a a freak show. It's it's I I noticed in my email now, Google now, they offer a summarize the conversation button on every email. No matter how short the email is, by the way, I have I I just received an email from somebody, and there was a date in question, and the person wrote, 13/30/24. And, you know, I'm in Europe half the time, and so it's like 13: 0:23

30. Is that is that in the US?

Is that wait. There's no such thing as 13: 0:24

30. You know? And I was like and so I sent him a note. What do you mean?

And he said, oh, I'm sorry. I meant 12. I'm get December. He said so, anyway, I hit the summarize button, and it said, he said this, he said that, and then and it and the and it was 13:30: 0:25

24. So it it missed the whole last two emails of the summarized chat about the point of confusion. It's just you can't rely on this stuff. It it it it's it's very misleading. So the the bottom line summary from my perspective is that if you're using AI, generative AI, and getting value out of it, bless you. Enjoy. Just be careful. You can't trust all of it. But if you if you're getting power out of it, it's certainly there are parts of my day that are faster. There are parts of a lot of people's day that are faster. But I think it's still more hype than reality, and I don't think anything is settled down yet. So it's gonna be interesting to keep watching for next year. So the prediction is no prediction. One of the predictions I got wrong of the many that I got right for this year, one of the predictions I got wrong is that the office culture wars would die down. Man, did I blow that one. That one was terrible. With with with the Amazon announcement that you have to return to the office and news coming out just last week that oh, by the way, they said they wanted everybody to return to the office, but they didn't do the math, and they don't have enough desks for them. So what was that announcement really all about if the results were impossible? Like, we we had a a conversation about that. But, you know, there are still massive layoffs in the tech industry from very profitable companies. You know, the the whole David David, I I think I think, David, I just wanna say once again, you are wrong because actually, I think you've got this right. And so you're you're trying to say you've got this wrong. I think the culture wars have, calmed down. And what we're seeing about this return to office stuff is just theater. And it's getting headlines like the Amazon thing because it is theater. And like you said, Amazon wasn't even prepared for it. But there seems to just be a general awareness that I'm finding for more and more people that I'm talking to that remote work is the way of the the norm and the way of the future and the way things are going to be. And so I don't think we're ever gonna see a mass return to the office. Of course, there's exceptions, and, of course, there's headlines when there are exceptions. But I think you actually got this one right. Oh, okay. Well, I'll I'll I'll take credit for it then. I never mind never mind what I said before. Alright. So going back through our list here, we we I think we have to talk about the prediction that you had that was right about Cisco and Microsoft. You know, cats and dogs dancing together in the streets and and and, you know, the the fact that that that Cisco added the the Microsoft Teams platform to their endpoints, they're doing gangbusters business with that right now. They're displacing a lot of the smaller rivals, and it's certainly upsetting the market. And we haven't even gotten MDIP out there yet, which was another thing we were talking about, and whether or not any of the legacy players, including Cisco, will be changing over to MDIP. So, you know, what are your thoughts about, you know, the the the, the the incompatibles now being Well, the part that I got right that you talked about was that was, you know, Microsoft worked really hard to build out their MTR environment with different hardware vendors, and they had it sized right. And then, oh, by the way, we're adding Cisco. It's like, oh, that's kinda that's not a that's not a footnote item. That's a that's a big item. And so, obviously, if Cisco's gonna come in, there's going to be, you know, a big player in town. Is that is the growth going to just accommodate that, or is the growth gonna be less than the amount that Cisco's gonna grow? And I think that's the reality that we're in. So I think all the other players, some more than others, are being, affected by, Cisco's growth in that Microsoft space. And I think it was a brilliant strategy on Cisco's part because, you know, they realized what was going on with Teams, and they said, you know, we we gotta get up we gotta hitch to that that that ship. Hit hit hitch to that truck. I don't know what you call it. Hitched to something. So I I think that, that that's working out really well for Cisco. I'm a little concerned in general about Microsoft's dominance, and you've seen I've done a couple of posts on this. I compared it to the bill system, but we have we've never had a a vendor in enterprise communications this dominant in the US since the Bell System. And, and and that's tough for a lot of competitors. And so, you know, we're used to you know, if if you think back to just 10 years ago, all the different, UCaaS players and even PBX players and all the different options vendors had, it's really a matter of, well, do I go with Direct Routing to Teams or do I go with, OperatorConnect to Teams or do I just, you know, do I go to the Teams native to Teams? You know, it it's really become a much narrower conversation and a lot less innovation as that is occurring. Yeah. And and, you know, it's not on the list, but we also talked about how the the phone, the the desktop phone is changing from a communication device, which it still is. You know, we've predicted the death of the phone for years, and it never happened. I still have my phone here. You know, I still still have my handset. My ex company is still paying for it even though I've even blogged and told them to disconnect it. They haven't. So what the heck? But the phone is now an interactive device on the desk. It lets people know that you're there, that you're logged in. It does some presence. It even smiles at you if you buy the right brand phone. Well, okay. Here here we're gonna disagree a little bit. I I I do think the phone is dying, and I and I've been with you. I've been get I've been getting calls for 10 years about is the phone dead yet? And I keep on saying that's ridiculous. It's not gonna it's not dying. But I do believe it's dying now. I think the pandemic actually killed it. Remember, when the pandemic happened, we sent everybody home, we sent them home with laptops, we sent them home with keyboards, we sent them home with mice, we sent them home with webcams, we did not send them home with an IP phone. And and the softphone became more or less normal, and and and as we go back to the office, people are looking at their phones, and I don't know if I need this phone. Now here's a prediction, though. There's this is you you got you're the you're the first, David and the audience, you are the first to hear this particular prediction and and it's not a 25 prediction. It's probably about 2 or 3 years out. But we're going to see the rebirth of the phone. It's gonna be big, baby. It's gonna be big. And I'll tell you what's inspiring me on this. The prop the current phones today are kinda dumb. In fact, we went backwards. We went to IP phones, we went to SIP phones. A lot of features you could do on a phone went away cause the SIP phone just doesn't do much. It's on hook, off hook, pretty basic stuff. And we can't control the display like we used to be able to. Proprietary phones could just control that display. But I've been playing around with this new, Google phone that I've got And Google, of all companies, is actually made a pretty interesting, phone environment on the Google phone. So for example, when I call an 800 number, I get a a pull free I get a I get a, bunch of, menus, push 1 for this, push 2 for that. It's displaying the different options on the display. Push 1 for sales, push 2 for support, push 3 for whatever. It's displaying all this as it hears it. And it's doing a it's doing that's just one example, but it's doing a lot of really interesting features. It's like why isn't this more common? Well, the answer is because we can't control the display. We can't do a lot of this stuff. So I think we're gonna see a rebirth of the phone, but not the it's not gonna happen next year. It's gonna be a little further out. Okay. Well, you mentioned Google, so we might as well take that on and talk about some of the big tech news and wobbles and other things that happened. You know, Google was essentially, by the courts, declared a monopoly, and we're waiting to see if we're gonna live through another set of divestiture, which is very interesting. You know, the the Microsoft had their problems in the European Union, and they've been forced to unbundle Teams. And, you know, by the way, they're raising prices across everything, so that's gonna be interesting for them. I think that Facebook, which became meta because of the metaverse, has now abandoned most of the meta things. I don't think metaverse is gonna happen. You know, they had Spark AR and that's gone. They moved their workplace, people over to Zoom's Work Vivo. So, you know, a lot of these big tech companies have sort of like, oops, you know, like an elephant tripping. And they Well, I I think you I think you in the previous conversation called us, big tech wobbles, and there's been a lot of wobbling. One another one you didn't mention there is General Motors. They, just they're a car they abandon, Cruze. They're they're self driving car technology. You know, if GM can't pull this off, the mighty big GM, you know, this is obviously a pretty tough thing. Tesla's been trying it for, I don't know how many years. It's gonna be here next year, Elon said that. But In 2016, he said it. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. So so I I I think that, tech is harder than than we thought. It's getting harder and harder than we thought. The other thing is, you know, another wobble, you know, we we cut we blew up cable television, satellite television for streaming services because I remember I used to pay like $4 a month for Netflix, like that. It was great. I don't want the cable. I just want my own my premium stuff that I want. But all of a sudden, all the streaming services are back to the same price as we were paying for, cable. So so, you know, I I think the tech is actually a lot more expensive than people realize it is in general, and, and I think these companies have to rethink a lot of these things. It's a it's it's a sad state, but we're moving backwards in many ways. I was so looking forward to the metaverse. But I may But I and I but I was looking forward to the sec to second, second world. What was it called? 2nd 2nd life. 2nd life. Yeah. I was gonna say 2nd city TV, but but, as yeah. I was looking forward to 2nd life as well. So it's not the first time this has happened. You know, there may be a correlation between these big tech companies not being able to accomplish what they've promised and firing all of these people. You know, maybe it takes smart people to do some of these things. Just a thought. You know? You you know, there there there is indeed a, short attention span on Wall Street, and and that's driving a lot of a lot of decisions. And one of the things, you know, go go back to the bill system, whatever. They didn't have to worry about that. And they they did things like invent operating systems and transistors and, you know, all kinds of incredible stuff. But, but no. If it doesn't pay off next quarter, I'm afraid we're gonna have to reevaluate this project. So it's it's a very short attention span theater. Definitely. And I'm and I'm a big believer, and I don't wanna get into socialism and anything like that here, but I'm a very big believer that if companies that are profitable are going to have mass layoffs, there needs to be some penalty for the management. Either, you know, if you're firing more than 2,000 people, you also have to fire the CEO. It's a requirement. Or you have to pay their health care for 10 years or something to make it more painful. Because what's happening is CEOs and CFOs are doing these mass layoffs in tech, and then their stocks going up. They benefit from it. And until you take away that benefit, it's just gonna keep happening. Well, some of these you know, we we had the, the shooting of the UnitedHealth, CEO. So we are finding that there's a threshold to how much the public is willing to put up. What was really interesting I mean, we have to talk about this. What what what was really interesting is when there was an assassination attempt on Trump and people made comments like, you know, too bad he missed or whatever, there were repercussions. I mean, there were severe repercussions and people had to apologize and it's like, oh, I've never condone violence, etcetera. It was but just a few months later, this guy actually gets killed, not missed, not an attempt, but he actually gets killed. And all the social media is, like, thank goodness. You know, my my con my condolences are out of network or, you know, all these all these, comments about, you know, he deserved it. He had it he had it coming to him. There's a this is a big transition. This is, significant that people are getting a little more concerned about, their personal rights and their ability to, you know, flourish in our economy. So Yeah. That's one of the reasons we're not making predictions because, you know, we we are headed for, what I believe is a rough patch for the next few years, especially when it comes to these kind of things. So we'll keep our fingers crossed, and we'll move on to our last topic for today, which is I put it down as partnerships, and you changed the title to strange bedfellows because we had a lot of announcements this year, and we probably forgotten most of them. We started it with Cisco Microsoft. You know, obviously, that's that's one of the biggest ones, but there were there were a bunch of there was a couple that you announced at enterprise. You know, you gotta remember because some of these some of these some of our viewers may not, have been have the memory span that we have. But, it was not that long ago. I remember when there was Skype for Business versus Webex or Spark, if you remember Spark for Cisco. Yeah. And Rowan and Zig would take turns at the keynotes at Enterprise Connect, slamming each other. I mean, they they, they they were like, these companies hated each other, and now they're now they're as, bedfellows as you say. But, yeah, go ahead with the No. You have made the the big announcement, with with Avaya and and Mitel, right, at Enterprise Connect, and then Zoom was added later in the year? No. We got that you're so close. The announcement was Avaya and Zoom, and then Avaya and Mitel. Mitel was added later in the year. I understand. So the Mitel and Zoom relationship was added. But yes. So brilliant blues, by the way. And and what's so powerful about that move, is this was possible 10 years ago. Right? There was there was nothing preventing this 10 years ago, but mindset. And so what's happened is our minds have we've we've we've we've come around. Right? So 10 years ago or even 20 years ago for that matter, but but let's just you know, 10 years ago, Avaya and Mitel and all the PBX makers thought that they would own and dominate the software as a service environment, that they would they were all investing heavily in it and they were gonna get there, and they they knew that they were first innovators, but that's okay. They're the established and they're gonna get there. That hasn't played out. In fact, very few PBX makers have made it to, UCaaS and CCaaS. On the other hand, Zoom was a, native pure cloud play, and they thought 10 years ago premises will be gone, you know, and and we have no need for that. And so they they went ahead and, you know, so this there was no way this partnership would have happened 10 years ago. Today, we have a huge amount of prem still out there or private cloud, whatever you wanna call it, however it's deployed. And we have a huge and cloud is still growing. And today, this partnership makes perfect sense. And I'm and and credit to both companies for realizing to actually implementing this. Yeah. And all 3 all 3 companies. All 3 go these are not the only things that were interesting that it has to do with strange bedfellows. We saw Google. I guess the best word to use is offload. Their their star their their starline, you know, beautiful 3 d video project over to HP. HP's been bragging about it for a year. Of course, they don't have it available for sale yet. Well, but you but but first, you have to first, you have to acknowledge that Starline kinda kinda went from beautiful 3 d down to basically a rally camera and a and a and a USB connection. And so then they said, hey. Maybe HP should run with this. But, so so it kinda downsized first. Important step. Yeah. So so that was one. And then you have all these marketplaces that popped up and changes. Like, Zoom, you can now get, and all the Zoom services are available in the, AWS marketplace. Neat launched their app hub. So when you have a neat device, you can just pick whatever you want and you can engage it from there. And then the one you were talking about was the growth, You know, the the blue and green combined. Right? RCS has finally come into its its its sharing. Tell people about that. Well, you know, the the the green and blue thing, there was always noise. And and and I shouldn't say noise. Noise. People do care about that, and people are impacted by that. So that that ridiculous, arbitrary, artificial restriction is now going away, but it always could have. Again, this is just a mindset thing. So, you know, the problem was that was that, Apple made their, what is it, Imessage? One client for both, their chat and and for SMS, and it was causing all kinds of trouble. They could have easily separated those anytime, but they didn't. But what the but the bigger story here, as you point out, is the RCS capability because we're seeing just you know, especially in contact center, we're seeing huge amounts of WhatsApp as a preferred channel, as as, Imessage as a preferred channel, Always proprietary over the top apps and the carriers have nothing and we don't have any universal solution. The only universal addresses we we have basically are 3. We we we have, email as a universal address, We have our phone numbers as a universal address, and many of our phone numbers can be universal for SMS, but as but it was broken with, Apple. So RCS re rereturns, the phone number for messaging, and it doesn't it's not even tied, by the way. People think it is. It's not even tied to mobile phones. You can have RCS on any phone number, and it's not quite here yet. I mean, it's it's here. I'm using it every day, But as as as this becomes more popular, becomes a they'll become a preferred channel for contact centers because it's more universal. There's gonna be a lot here to this RCS story. We're at the beginning the beginning of an interesting journey. And then speaking of beginnings, you know, we now have Alianza and Metaswitch. You know, Metaswitch being purchased from Microsoft. That's a very big deal for Alianza. Right? You predicted that one on our conversation with Scott Wharton. It's it's a really interesting, deal. You know, it's it's I I I used to work for a guy at a startup a long time ago and he said, he said, every year you have to bet the company. And I was like, really? Bet the entire company? It's like, you gotta make decisions about the this is a Allianz is betting the entire company. They're they are doubling. I mean, Allianz is a a US based company out of Utah. They only serve the US. They they hope they have, you know, 300 employees, something like that, don't quote me, around there. And they just bought Metaswitch, which has, which is a global company, offices around the world. They doubled their head count and this is gonna be a make or break thing and it could be one of the smartest things they've ever you know, make or that's the company. It could be one of the smartest things they've they've done or it could be the end of Alianza. It'll be, everyone is everyone is, like, scooting up and can't wait to see how this plays out. But this whole space, this service provider voice space, I believe is gonna be very important the next few years. You know, the pendulum in telecom always swings, one way or the other. It's been swinging for the past, I don't know, 10 years toward, away from service provider voice, toward over the top applications like Teams and Webex and Zoom. And and I believe we're gonna start to see that swing back towards service provider voice for a whole bunch of reasons which I've outlined in some of the content. But but, so this is a very interesting play for Alyonset. Good luck to them. So So this is what we thought was exciting, in the year 2024. We've got 2025 here now right in front of us, and, you know, we're gonna be at a lot of How many? We we're gonna be at Enterprise Connect through CES. We're going to be at, at ISU. Congress? Info oh, just gonna be an amazing year, and we'll bring you more musings, but this is what we felt was important. So thanks very much for joining us. Thanks, Dave. Happy New Year to you. Happy New Year to you. We'll see you on the next one. Thanks a lot.