Comment by mscantland | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mscantland | Hacker News Reader

This is a market that is ripe for innovation. The large incumbents are very expensive and offer an experience that borders on abuse.

My company has about a half-dozen heavy users and we spend more than $300 per month on this junk. A lighter-weight $20/month solution could do very well I think. Here would be my feature list:

* Cross-platform HTML5, not a java plugin or Flash

* Cope with multiple screens and very high screen resolutions for presenters (so viewers on crappy hardware don't suffer)

* Simple interface. Nothing but "share screen" and "invite participant." No chat, surveys, hand raising or other cruft.

You would also want to support corporate pricing as a lot of users are at big cos.

I agree with you here. But the only problem is... you need the stomach for the enterprise sales cycle. Meaning 6-12 months. Anybody looking to jump in should do lots of homework here and if a willing corporate pre-buyer is there, line them up and let them pay to build the product. Leveraging their connections could also be a benefit. What company feels the most pain from this/would pay for it?

I think the very biggest companies (with hundreds/thousands of users) would require a long sales cycle, but I would start by ignoring that market since those companies aren't going to move to this new upstart until it has some history.

So the bulk of this business probably starts with individual accounts and small departments/companies (<50 users). This group is making purchase decisions much like consumers. That group can be sold on the web, and just needs bulk pricing options to feel good about their purchase decision.

I work with a small company with 5 employees. We wanted to go with some of the established players like webex or gotomeeting but found the pricing to be prohibitive and overly complex.

I have not done the research but I can say that if we had found a lower priced and simpler alternative then we definitely would have bought into it.

I don't think HTML5 has direct screen sharing capability yet.

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