PlaceWare

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

~ the obituary ~

PlaceWare came out of Xerox PARC in 1996, which is the detail that explains the product. Pavel Curtis, one of the three founders, had built LambdaMOO at PARC in 1990: a text world that thousands of people inhabited at once, with rooms you moved between and objects that other people could see you pick up. He had spent years on the question of what makes a shared online space feel like a place instead of a message queue, and the company was that research with a business model attached.

PlaceWare Auditorium launched in march 1997. The metaphor was literal. There was a stage where the presenter stood with the slides and rows where the audience sat, you could raise a hand and send a question forward, and there was a backstage where the people running the event talked to each other without the room hearing it. It ran in a web browser, which in 1997 meant it had to survive on a connection that could not carry video and mostly could not carry audio either, so it did not try. Slides and text, with the audio typically coming over a separate telephone bridge.

Hewlett-Packard and Intel were early customers, along with Sun and PBS. This was not consumer software at any point. It was sold as the thing you use for a company all-hands or a product launch or an analyst briefing, where the audience is in the hundreds and mostly listening, and by the time Microsoft came calling more than 3,100 companies were paying for it.

In 1997 my internet arrived through a modem, and none of what PlaceWare did was physically possible on it. A browser meeting with three hundred people in it was a thing that existed in press releases from another country and in offices with leased lines. It took roughly twenty-three years and a pandemic before sitting in a meeting through a browser became something that happened to everyone, at which point it seemed to arrive from nowhere, and nobody was going to mention that a company had built the same idea for corporate America while people were still arguing about frames in HTML.

~ the case file ~

~ what it became ~

Microsoft announced its intention to buy on 21 january 2003 and completed on 30 april, for something around $200 million. It was folded into a newly created Real Time Collaboration Group and the product was renamed Microsoft Office Live Meeting. The engineering did not vanish. The company did, immediately and completely, in the way that a product acquisition usually goes.

Live Meeting then went through the standard Microsoft migration. It gave way to Lync in 2010, Lync became Skype for Business in 2015, and the meeting functionality ended up inside Teams, where several hundred million people now use a descendant of PlaceWare Auditorium without the word ever crossing their desk. Microsoft's own external link for PlaceWare pointed at the Live Meeting product page for years after both names had stopped meaning anything.

~ the funny part ~

Microsoft bought the wrong one, in the sense that mattered commercially. WebEx was the competitor, founded a year later, and it took the market that PlaceWare had defined. Cisco paid $3.2 billion for WebEx in 2007, sixteen times what Microsoft had paid four years earlier for the company with the better pedigree.

The other part worth keeping is what happened to the metaphor. PlaceWare's stage and backstage came from a virtual world where the point was that you were somewhere with other people. Twenty-five years of refinement later, the same market converged on a grid of rectangles where nobody has a position relative to anybody else and the only spatial idea left is who is speaking loudest. The research that produced PlaceWare had an answer to that problem in 1990, and the answer did not survive contact with the enterprise sales cycle.

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