Tandberg C20

I was at Infocomm this week and saw the new Tandberg C20.

Damn! Its a sweet looking system. 1080P, NPP, Dual display.

The unit is soooo small....so slim...you could easily hang it on the back of the plasma and never find it again. The microphones are sooo small... i would guess you coudl stack three of them and be equal in height the plcm hdx mics. talk about making a conference table look neater.

Tandberg is absolutely putting their foot on the gas and showing that they are the market leader.

Its amazing how fast Tandberg pulled from being half the size of Polycom to somewhat larger in such a small amount of time.

Big yawn

This came out today:

http://www.polycom.com/products/telepresence_video/telepresence_solutions/room_telepresence/hdx6000.html

If you were at Infocomm and you walked into other people's booths...everyone was showing new 1080P products... or if it was a 720P product, it was a desktop PC based system.

I know I must come off as really beating on Polycom...its not personal.. they just seem to make the weirdest product decisions for the last few years.

$6K for a 720P system? When TAA just came out with a $8K 1080P system. Or I could buy Lifesize Express 200 for $7K?

The other thing that just kills me...and I was saying this internally 2 years ago.. you can't call this stuff telepresence. If you do...you'll water down the market... you'll kill your ability to sell RPX and especially TPX.

It reminds me how when you walk into a PLCM demo center that you often find a HDX not far away from the TPX or RPX room. Honestly... when you get down to it... PLCM is really saying... hey, I'll sell you one really expensive conference table and I'l throw in the codecs for free. Besides..the system looks like it came from IKEA.

If you're reading this and you work for PLCM...this is not me negative...its tough love. You need to focus on what customers are going to make decisions on and they are making decisions based on what the competition is offering. You've got to have a different value add...and you've got to start acting like a industry leader if you're ever going to claw your way back to that position. At this point...if PLCM doesn't start acting aggressively, they soon will be the #3 in the market behind Lifesize and Tandberg. PLCM can do it... you stil have some smart people working there.. don't stymie their creativeness!!!!

More forced PTOs

I'm not sure how Polycom is going to keep their customers happy if their employees are always on PTO. I sent some emails to people today and most got this automated response:

"I'm currently Out of Office - On PTO- June 15th through June 18th -If immediate assitance is required please email..."

"I will be out of the office until Tuesday, June 16th, and will respond to email when I return. "

"I am out of the office on Monday June 15, returning on Tuesday June 16. During this time, I will have limited access to email or vmail. If you need immediate assistance, please contact"

"I am out of the office until June 22nd with limited email. "

Besides the fact that most employees are out of PTO?????