Last Friday the official word came out. ORTC API is now available in Microsoft Edge with current focus on audio and video communication. The support is currently in the Windows Insider Preview release. Microsoft now claims to be enabling seamless communication experiences for the web with Skype, but is it really seamless? Let’s take a closer look at what exactly is being provided and more importantly, where are the pitfalls.
The Drift from Closed Services to PaaS Continues
Unify announced the availability of APIs for their Circuit collaboration platform opening it for the general public of developers. This is not the first time we see closed WebRTC based collaboration platforms in the cloud open up for developers. What drives companies to make this kind of shift and does it pay off? UC vendors need to reinvent themselves, abandon the term UC
WebRTC Usage Numbers are Hard to Quantify
A similar but more complex question arises for WebRTC. WebRTC is a lower level technology than WordPress. WordPress is more of a complete solution than WebRTC. WebRTC has a more permissive license (BSD for both the Google and Ericsson implementations) and there are good reasons to reuse sub-components of it for different purposes.