Room ware bonanza

The lack of a long term vision for meeting room technology is evidenced when we visit corporate meeting rooms today. Most executives stopped using overhead projectors and photocopies for some time. Nowadays they bring their laptops to the meeting room, and require the LCD projectors to be available. Typically LCD resolutions lag behind the one that is available from the company laptop standards. Likewise, note taking process from the room copy board cannot be exported to the laptops in the room or to the network.

Some companies had brought costly ISDN lines to the meeting room for audio and videoconferencing. More recently they discover the internet has now enough bandwidth for high quality videoconference, so new equipments are purchased. Finally the operation of all these "roomware" technologies needs to be controlled from a single location and more money is spend on cabling and wiring everything back to a room control hub, probably operated by proprietary communication protocols. In the end of the years, corporate board rooms absorb a lot of money. Yet the total amount of money that is spend in meeting rooms is normally way beyond the full benefits in terms of group productivity it should be delivering.