Cisco buys WebEx

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Cisco buys WebEx - AP Newswire story.

Will it suck less? Stay tuned...

Here's hoping they can make it better.

I've pretty much given up on WebEx as a tool for collaboration. Our shop is 90% Mac, and WebEx just fails. Even on Windows it's poky as can be.

I'm becoming a big fan of Adobe's Breeze product, now called Acrobat Connect. The times I've used it, it did an especially great job on PowerPoint - it turns the .ppt into a Flash file (using FlashPaper). You've got the Flash presentation running locally on both computers, and all that's being transmitted is lightweight commands, rather than gobs of pixels.

By contrast, WebEx seems to be pushing whole screenfuls of content over the wire constantly - the brute force approach.

We're also eagerly anticipating iChat's next iteration - it's supposed to be able to share the local desktop. We'll see.

Link to AP story.