Whip:Horizonlive

I have recently posted a kind and exhaustive reply to Gennaro Brooks posting on Stephen Lahanas' ElearningLeaders YahooGroup while offering specific advice for some live collaboration tools that would allow him to run some of his consulting and training courses directly online.

While Gennaro was very happy of my posting and took me for a successful private consulting gig, HorizonLive representative Sharon Anstey sent me the following email:

"Dear Robin,
I noticed your posting on elearning leaders. While well informed, you appear not to be aware of HorizonLive. Feel free to explore.

If you are evaluating alternatives in delivering live learning over the Internet, HorizonLive has developed an elegantly simple solution to this challenge as is evident in the choice of institutions such as Cal State (Chico), Arizona State, the University of Georgia and Strayer University and companies such as MetLife, Ernst & Young and Adecco. While most of our clients use HorizonLive for online teaching and training, the 108-campus California Community College system employs HorizonLive to support web-based conferencing for its 82,000 faculty and administrators.

Horizon is distinguished by its simplicity and ease of use coupled with flexibility and power. We enable audio or video, no software download is required and we have a superior archiving capability.

We offer live full screen cross-platform application-sharing and follow-me web browsing. All of these tools are plug-in free, work in both IE and Netscape on PC, Mac and Unix platforms. No proprietary software is required to deliver a HorizonLive session for participants or presenters, and all sessions can be automatically recorded for future playback.

We'd be delighted to have you join us for a live demonstration. Please register here.

If you are not responsible for this initiative, we would appreciate an opportunity to explore the notion of applying live e-learning within your organization. Please would you direct me to the individual responsible for making this evaluation.

Warm regards,

Sharon Anstey
Account Development

Check out Horizonlive and take the Tour!

View an archive

*****end of message

What HorizonLive as several other large, enterprise-oriented web conferencing vendors do not yet realize is the following:

1) I don't like canned messages that have nothing of personal communication but the first paragraph. If you want me to listen you better start talking seriously with me or do you want to hear some of my tapes too?

2) HorizonLive charges a price per seat per minute that is simply out of the normal possibilities of any normal professional that is not financed by a large company or corporation. Since I, as Robin Good, intend to best serve the individual, the professional, the small and the non-profit, I have no interest in reporting or learning more about a company that clearly shows no interest for this peculiar market of mine.

3) HorizonLive offers for me no way to test out their product out of participating in another "canned" demo in which I have no way, time or opportunity to play around and see how the system fits my need once I am abandoned to it alone. If a company can't offer me to try out their system fully, I am not going to report about it.

4) Most of these large Web conferencing companies think that they hold some kind of unique leadership, rare technology and perfect combination of facilities. Fact is that this is being refined everyday and these companies are hardly participating in the discourse. New smaller companies have long surpassed the features and facilities available through these large vendors' systems in one or more areas and at costs that are just accessible to anyone. Fact is not many people know about this.

5) Web conferencing companies that have a great product must allow people to try them out with all features active. If that tool is so good and if the cost is so great there is just no way that I will not want you to bill me when the time comes. Or not?

6) Why, you, HorizonLive are not reading what the original poster was really asking for and understand that he really does not need a tool as expensive as yours? Listening and engaing in a real, uncanned conversation is the only way out you have from becoming an obsolete, soon to be extinct breed.
Cluetrain Manifesto teaches.

So this is what I wrote back to Sharon:

"Dear Sharon,

though I am well aware of HorizonLive, I have chosen not include it in my answer as it does not fit the requirements indicated by original poster. He is looking for a SOHO solution, and through a private online session later on yesterday, I have been able to have him identify a perfect solution for his needs.

HorizonLive is way too expensive compared to the other listed solutions and cannot be considered a service targeted at the SOHO market. Also HorizonLive offers only live controlled demos and I have been personally unable, despite my requests, to have access to an effective try-out.

Given the above HorizonLive makes the same mistakes of other "enterprise" targeted web conferencing systems not understanding that selling to the individual or the small company is much harder to sell to than large companies and organizations and it requires a lot more integrity, transparency and a true winning product in your hands.

I would really wish HorizonLive to become a "listening" company and to come to understand that if this market is of REAL interest to you, you better start looking around as things have been moving a lot faster than you realize.

There are new options, great facilities and tools, but yours is not among them.

Sincerely,

Robin Good
Official Guide to SOHO Web Conferencing and Live Presentation Tools
http://www.masternewmedia.org/"

What do you think?