NetMeeting

~ the obituary ~

i never made a netmeeting call. nobody i knew did. but the program sat in the start menu of every windows 98 and xp machine i ever booted, an unused conspicuous executable named conf.exe that promised video calling in the late 90s and never actually delivered to anybody i knew. the icon was a small cartoon of two people pointing at each other. the wizard asked for your name and an "ils server" address you had no idea how to fill in.

microsoft shipped netmeeting as part of the internet explorer 3 package on may 29, 1996. it was tactical. real-time communication on the internet was not a solved problem at the time, and microsoft wanted a flag planted in that category before anyone else got there. the underlying technology came partly from a uk firm called data connection ltd and partly from a us company called databeam. microsoft built a usable wrapper around the h.323 and t.120 protocols and bundled the result with windows.

the problem was that the network underneath the program was not ready. h.323 voip in 1998 needed both ends to have a public ip address and a fast enough connection running matching codecs. dial-up at home in turkey ran 33.6k or 56k. video over that was a slideshow. voice over that was a slideshow with audio. the only people who ever made netmeeting work in practice were corporate users on early ethernet lans, and even they preferred picking up the phone.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually was ~

netmeeting did more than voice and video. the application sharing feature let one person open word and have another person watch and edit the same document in real time. desktop sharing let you take over someone else's machine. the t.120 protocol underneath was the standard for "data conferencing" and was technically impressive for 1996. webex would later build a billion-dollar business on basically this same idea, but with a web frontend.

what microsoft did not crack was discovery. to call somebody on netmeeting you had to know their ip address or have them logged into a microsoft ils directory server. ils was a directory of online users where you could see who was available. it was also a near-complete list of every weirdo on the internet, since it indexed everyone by self-reported interests. by 1999 the public ils directories had become unusable for normal people because of the volume of obscene username spam.

~ the slide ~

windows xp shipped in october 2001 with netmeeting still installed but with the start menu shortcut removed. you could still launch it by typing conf.exe in the run dialog. that was the moment microsoft signaled internally that the product was over, even though the binary stayed on the install disc for another six years. xp service pack 2 in 2004 added a firewall that blocked incoming h.323 by default, which finished off whatever residual usage there was on home networks.

by 2003 skype had launched and was solving the discovery problem netmeeting had failed to solve. skype assigned every user a username and routed calls through a peer-to-peer network that did not need public ip addresses. you typed in a name and called. there was no ils to wade through and no firewall to punch. inside three years skype had what netmeeting had failed to build over a full decade.

~ what it became ~

windows vista in january 2007 dropped netmeeting from the install. the replacement was windows meeting space, which was a peer-to-peer collaboration tool nobody used either, and which got dropped in turn from windows 7 in 2009. microsoft's recommended path was lync for business and skype for everyone else, after microsoft bought skype for 8.5 billion dollars in 2011. the netmeeting binary version 3.02 shipped on march 22, 2007 and was never updated again.

the legacy that did survive was the protocol stack. h.323 became the backbone of every enterprise videoconferencing system through the 2010s. polycom hardware, cisco telepresence rooms, every "press 1 to dial in" gateway you ever joined, all of that sat on top of the standards netmeeting had popularized. the program died but the plumbing it ran on outlived it by twenty years.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »