Chatz: June 2025 Infocomm and Seachange

In this episode of TalkingPointz Chatz, Dave Michels and David Danto unpack a series of “sea changes” sweeping across tech and communications. They start by examining how AI engines are replacing traditional search tools, reshaping how users find information. The conversation shifts to LinkedIn’s emergence as the dominant professional social platform in the wake of Twitter’s decline. Most notably, they dive into the evolution of meeting room technology – from proprietary video appliances to streamlined BYOD/BYOM setups – and highlight the manufacturers that are embracing this shift, including Barco, Jabra, Logitech, and others. It’s a fast-paced, thoughtful look at how user habits and enterprise tools are adapting in real time.

Transcript

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Hi it's Dave Michaels from Talking Points. I'm with Dave Dantil from Talking Points and, welcome To a Talking Points chat. It's been a while since we've done a chat, David. We've been really busy, going all over the place and, you know, whether, whether we're meeting in Brussels or meeting in New Jersey or, you know, conferences and seminars and. Wow, it's been a very busy, couple of months, culminating, in a couple of weeks at Infocom in Orlando. Yeah, so that's right. We're still, still going places. And I'm leaving. I get to cross the Atlantic once again. I think. I think this year it's going to be, I think, four or five transatlantic crossings altogether. But maybe, we're still counting. We'll see. But, yes, since we've been over the water so much and trans. Going back and forth, I think we were going to talk a little bit about the sea changes that we're starting to see going on. Oh, there you go. The sea change. Yeah. Because we see change everywhere. But, yeah, you know, I was thinking about it. We both experienced and have obviously understood and, lived through a fairly significant sea change in, social networks. I think most, both of us have kind of moved to LinkedIn as our primary. And it's so different, right, because I used to be so active on Twitter and Twitter's the correct term when in past tense, that, that use it. You, you, you don't just move, you change. Right. You do things differently. And, and one thing in Twitter you always did was share a URL, and LinkedIn doesn't really like that. So I don't really share URL. So it's like, it's like so. And so I was thinking about that, because we just did our Insider Light newsletter and I was like, where do I post this? And, and it's like, it's just not the same. Right. We don't. We. We used to do things on Twitter to kind of broadcast and, and share content, and you. And, and LinkedIn is more about sharing ideas. But then there's also, as we have in the new Insider report, which hasn't gone out yet, a sea change going on in search because a lot of us are now using, AI or ChatGPT or whatever you want to call it to just get an answer as opposed to a search. And I don't know if people realize how significant of a change that is. I mean, I mean, there's a lot of ramifications in this, in this. Behavioral change. Yeah. You know, when I was traveling with my wife before we went to the last conference in, in Courtrick, you know, she would ask me a question about, well, how do we do? What are the top 10 things to see? What do we go? And that's the kind of thing I would normally search for. And honestly, I didn't even bother anymore. I just typed it into an AI. And you know, I. I am under the opinion that some of that stuff is still wrong and hallucinations, so I'm not taking it as verbatim, but wow, it's so complete and so easy to use that, you know, a lot of people are not bothering to use search. And, and we, we posted in the last Insider report that the cool thing that with, with, with Google Search now, that if you don't want to have its AI suggestion at the beginning, if you just use, you know, some curse in your, in your request, it immediately omits all of the AI, which may not be the easiest way to do it, but it's more fun. Well, well, my, My epiphany moment was, a few weeks ago, I think it was. I know it was Zoom announced a partnership with ServiceNow. And there was a little voice in my head and it's like, wait a minute, ServiceNow isn't their CEO on the Zoom board? And I was about to go to Google Search and what would you do? Who is the CEO of, ServiceNow? So I couldn't remember his name. Who are the board members of Zoo? It's like three or four searches, right? To get the. And what I did is I just went to Gemini and I said something like, I forget what I did, but it was a simple sentence, simple question that told me it was, Bill McDermott is the CEO and he is on the board of Zoom. It was like, wow, that was really easy. So anyway, what happened was in a court case, Apple admitted that, they're seeing a big decline in search traffic and that caused Google stock to drop. I. But the thing is, this is sea change, right? Because there's so much industry, so much of our, so much of our world is based on Google Search is based on, you know, like, like websites getting eyeballs that way. Ad revenue, everybody want, you know, search engine optimization specialists that help you figure out how to get your content more discoverable. But none of that's going to matter anymore, right? And the ad revenue for all these web, for all these publishers is going to Disappear. And so, yeah, Google's going to take a potential hit. We're going to see all these websites take a potential hit and the whole concept of things like SEO become obsolete. So, so big ramification there. But the point of all that, that was the introduction. The point of all this is that, I expect to see some sea change at Infocom. So what kind of changes are you expecting? It's really, it's an interesting situation because, you know, everybody knows that I started my career on the end user side in the enterprises and we had, you know, video conferencing from all these big companies. And then Microsoft came along. I guess it was OCS or lcs, one of them where, you know, you stick a little webcam in between two flat panels and they call that a video conference room. And that was ridiculous because video conferencing in our time, you needed cdr, you needed nice big, you know, appliances in the. I remember the guys at Logitech were very, very proud of the fact that it was their webcam. But, but, but nonetheless. Yes, yeah, so, so, and now we look after decades of all of that, we're back to these little webcams. I mean Microsoft is calling them Express Install at this point and it's a, but you know, the webcam is so much more powerful now that actually can do a decent job. And we're seeing sea change. The entire industry sort of move closer to this. Bring your own. Well, my, my first room system. My first room system was the Logitech BCC9. I don't remember the number. It was a, it was the most ridiculous name for any product behind me. Yeah, the little eyeball camera with the other eyeball camera and the stick that it had. And it was, and the claim to fame was it worked with Skype and, and you know, it was, it was, that was my first room system. I was like, wow, this is really, really cool. And so, and so basically you had room systems like the telepresence stuff on the high end, which was for the billionaire class. And then you had the eyeball and a stick, for the rest of us. And we've seen, you know, the big rooms kind of get, come down and we've seen, I don't know, maybe we should say a pendulum swinging back and forth between high and sophisticated room systems. Back to byod. And now they have different names for byod. It was just simple when it was byod. Bring your own laptop or whatever. Now it's like, what's this BYOM thing and there's like, there's like all these other BYOs. What is all this nonsense? But anyway, go ahead. It's attacking the, it's attacking a space that is really underserved. And I guess most manufacturers and service artists now realize that is these smaller rooms. We used to call them huddle rooms. Now nobody huddles because we're after Covid who wants to get close to anybody. But, but we're now attacking these smaller spaces and, and you're seeing provider after provider making different products available for that. Let's just reel some off. No preferences, no anything else you had. You have Cisco with their room bar BYOD which is taking their small bar, giving it a lower price. Just plug your system in. So basically took a high end Cisco system and made it a meetup. Right. Essentially, you know, and, and, and if you don't plug the control panel in, you just use it that way. And if you plug the control panel in up, they can upcharge you for it. Which is fine. It's a, it's an E to, to increase. But you have NEAT doing exactly the same thing with their NEAT select. We know we've got a Barco announcement coming out, you know, in the next few days where one would assume that they're going to be talking about this BYOD space and boom. Just announced Something called the ARC or something. Is that a BYO Or D or one of these things? Yeah. They didn't have a press release out on the, the details of it but they did send it in advance of infographics. Another one for bring your own meeting. It looks like it's a dock for the room but it'll handle two laptops at the same time so you can switch between the two of them multiple displays. It's sort of like a switching dock. So now I gotta bring, I gotta bring my own device twice. I gotta bring two laptops now. Well no, if we both bring laptops we don't have to share one connection and go back and forth I think is that, I think that's the point. We'll have to see the next iteration of this will bring your. Bring your own meeting room and we could all bring our own meeting rooms to our meeting rooms. Well that's possible but you know again we're about to publish a view right review right after Infocomm of the Sennheiser team connect bar. They're doing exactly the same thing. They're giving you one cable a USB C into your computer for a BYO BYOD experience. And they're taking all the rooms, peripherals, you know, whether they're coming in over Dante over audio or the, the HDMI for the displays or whatever. And they're bringing all of it in through that one USB C connection. So again making it more convenient for the people bringing their own meeting. It is a sea change, you know, both in that room appliances, if we can even use that word anymore and are much less expensive and most people aren't focusing on them because you can now get metrics from these BYOM and the Microsoft capabilities now let you know speaker attribution, which they never used to do on a personal notebook. They let you not mute out the other sounds. And if I'm doing a call with you, on Microsoft Teams, one of the features in teams is it'll mute out everybody who's not me because it knows it's my computer. When you plug it into a room system, Microsoft now says, oh, I see you're plugged into a room system. Now I'm going to let you attribute everybody else who's speaking in the room and bring it. So you know, I think we are seeing a sea change with that. It's going to be interesting to see what else we see at Infocom this year. Well, we know one thing, we're going to see a lot of we're going to see a lot of MDEP would be my guess. You're not only going to see MDEP for Microsoft Teams. I believe you're going to see MDEP break out into other non video conferencing applications. Oh my gosh. Who predicted that? Who could have, who could have predicted that would happen? I don't think it'll be a mobile phone, but we'll see. We'll find out at Infocom and we will be doing our pick hits again and we have you know, a good handful of vendors that are, got some really interesting stories that we want to make sure that people don't lose in the noise floor because there will be a lot of noise, there'll be a lot of people talking and it'll be hot and it'll be Orlando. So last time I saw you was in was in Quartrek, Belgium. Are you going after, after Orlando? What's your next big stop after Orlando? Oh, I'm going to Brussels. I'm going back to Belgium. You know, you can't get enough of them waffles. Well, you have to, you have to Take a break from the waffles to have some beer and chocolate and fries. But other than that, you just can't get enough of the waffle. But yeah, going back to Belgium, I'll be at the Cloud Communications alliance talking about one of my favorite topics, which is UCAS mobility. And it's actually the meeting which is kind of a bit ironic. The meeting is actually being hosted by Destiny, which is one of the companies that are very active in this space. And I didn't quite realize that. So now I have to change my presentation a little bit because it might be rude to say things in their own house. So now it's going to be a little more, we'll call it educational. Good presentation. Putting that together on you guys mobility. I do think you guys mobility, very misunderstood and a significant, sea change occurring. Occurring, you know, especially here in Europe. People really live on these things in Europe. I noticed when we were in Brussels that almost every restaurant I went to doesn't have a menu anymore. They just have a QR code right at the table. Yeah, that's one example. And, and, and you know, if you want to make a reservation at the restaurant, you probably have to use WhatsApp. It's a very, very different environment here over here and very mobile, mobile centric environment. So while you're going back to Brussels, I'm going to have a pretty quiet summer here. But then, right at the beginning of September, I'm going back to Cedia Commercial Integrator Expo. We'll be giving some unified communications and AI presentations there in Denver. That'll be in Denver, right? Yep. We going to your back to your old hometown and you won't be there. Yeah, and that is my hometown. And, and we did that conference together last year, but I won't make it there this year. But but yeah, Denver's, Denver's great. And be sure to get some good barbecue. You know. Yeah, there's certain things whenever, whenever I'm in, you know, I travel so much. I have certain things I have to eat in every, in every city. And, and although Texas is known for the barbecue, Denver's got good barbecue and Denver's got good beef with good steaks. So I always try to get a lot of those, when I'm In Denver. Cool. All right, well I'll definitely see you in Orlando in about a week or so and we'll, we'll chat. What are we gonna eat in Orlando. You can eat any fast food you want. Any chain store you want. Orlando. God, they still have sizzlers open down there, for gosh sake. So, you know, we could. Yeah, high end, low end, medium end. I'll see at the Walmart. Remember, I always buy the water and the supplies there. So I don't know. I'm having cravings for milkshakes. So we'll go to a burgers place and get a good notion. You can't get. You can't get milkshakes over here. I. That you. I can find. I can find these, like, American burger places that have the American menu down, except for they don't have milkshakes. And I asked them, do you have milkshakes? And they're like. They look at me like from a different planet. It's like, why would you want a milkshake? Well, when we're at Infocom, we'll walk over to the Google people that are going to be. I don't know what they've renamed Starline to Beam. Beam me up, beam me down. We'll see if they can beam you a milkshake in, in Lisbon. In 3D. In 3D. Very good. All right. Until then, see you in Orlando.