Marratech

» see marratech.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

E-meeting software was bought by IT departments, not by people. Marratech sold to universities and to companies with staff in two cities, and through its whole life I was neither the person choosing a conferencing license nor the person being told to install one. This is a product I can describe from the outside and nothing more.

It came out of Luleå University of Technology in 1998, a spin-off from the Centre for Distance-Spanning Technology with eight founders on the paperwork, Peter Parnes and Serge Lachapelle among them. The product was a client you downloaded. Inside it you got voice and video, plus a whiteboard everyone could draw on and the ability to hand your running application to the room, which in 1998 was a research problem rather than a feature list.

Google announced the purchase on its corporate blog on 20 April 2007. The price was never disclosed and Swedish reporting put it around 100 million kronor. The stated reason was internal. Google said its own people work across offices and time zones and thrive on the casual interaction that distance removes, and that it had already been using the software in a limited way and wanted more of it. The engineers would stay in Sweden.

Then very little happened for two and a half years. On 12 December 2009 Marratech said the website would close before the year was out, and on 19 February 2010 the homepage announced that all services had been suspended. The server stopped handing out the client and the server software on the same day, which is the actual end: not a shutdown notice but a download link that no longer resolved.

~ the case file ~

~ thirty-one megabytes ~

The Windows client was a 31 megabyte download and the Mac one was 9, and TechCrunch put that number in the story as a mark against the product in 2007. It was already the wrong shape by then. WebEx was the competitor everybody named and WebEx ran in a browser, badly, through a plugin, but it ran there.

On the modem I had in 1998 a 31 megabyte file is most of an evening, and that is the era Marratech was designed inside. The assumption baked into it is that the thing running your meeting lives on your own disk, because the network cannot be trusted to carry it in real time. Every conferencing product built after about 2010 assumes the reverse.

~ the thing google kept ~

Read the coverage from April 2007 carefully and it says Google acquired Marratech's software, not Marratech. That distinction turned out to matter. Google never shipped the product to users and never bundled it with Talk or Toolbar the way the analysts guessed it would. It went inside the company and stayed there, and no plan for it was ever announced.

Cisco had agreed to pay 3.2 billion dollars for WebEx a few weeks earlier. Google paid something in the region of fourteen million for a Swedish alternative and then used it as staff plumbing. Read one way that is a company buying the cheap version of a thing it did not want to be in the business of selling. Read another way it is a company buying a team and being polite about it.

~ the swedish office ~

The acquisition is how Google got an engineering presence in Sweden. Serge Lachapelle, one of the Marratech founders, spent the next fourteen years running Google's real-time communication work. Voice and video in Gmail came first, and after Hangouts came the WebRTC platform that ended up as a standard everybody else builds on too.

He also drove Google's later purchases of Global IP Solutions and Limes Audio, which are the codec and the echo cancellation sitting under the calls. So the product died completely and the capability never did. If you have been in a Google Meet call, some fraction of what made it work traces back to a company in Luleå that shut its website off in December 2009 and answered nothing after February.

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