posted 28 November 2001 10:34 AM            

But I recently come to feel that what hampers the real growth of conferencing market is that there is not much availablity of solutions for either midium and small business companies.

I hear lots of wonderful solutions coming into the marketplace making me feel like they are all like panacea for anyone.

But when I was talking with a owner of a midium sized company at a IP conferencing seminar in Japan, he said that" all the solutions look fantastic, but not for us at all. Too expensive and it requires financial burden on us to implement the solution in our organization. Solution providers say it saves costs but for us it gives us nothing less than unecessary cost. We can not even affort to have broadband dedicated IP connection as well."

It seems to me solutions we are seeing in the marketplace is more like targeted for larger midium and large corporations. Not smaller midium and definately not for small business.

If we want to make this industry take off(which has been said for many months and years) and looking for ubiquity of conferencing, we need to provide solutions to these midium and small businesses as well. Otherwise, they will never turn to solutions that conferencing industry is offerring.

Roughly 95% of 2.5 million companies existant in Japan are small sized companies.

What do you think?

Keis

posted 30 November 2001 03:55 AM               

In the not to distant future we will all be wondering how we lived without such technolgy.

I still think that with MNC's leading the way, it will have a very positive effect on the SOHO take up of such services.

posted 30 November 2001 04:52 AM            

You may be right to some extent, but I think that it is not appropriate to generalize this as a Japanese barrier as so many Japanese companies are working with foreign companies and operating globaly recently.

I have no ideas to respond to your issue raised in your comment, I at least I am not a kind of a Japanese who trys to avoid meetings with foreign companies or persons, but this is quite an difficult issue and I am now trying to speculate reasons for that are:

1. no previous experience in working with foreign companies.
2. they do not know how to conduct business with foreign companies.
3. language difficulties

So they kind of become reluctant to work with foreign companies. It is kind of like,"We don't know them and we do not speak English, so better work with someone we know already in Japan, then". It is because I have met some Japanese who do not speak English tend to avoid meeting with foreigners simply because they do not speak English.

My wife who knows very little English is one of them, I often at my home get calls from overseas in English, but my wife is kind of like scared to pick it up as she can easily get in trouble communicating with the callers. Now she can at least say that,hello, just a moment,not home,back 5pm, but no more than that.

keis