Sayōnarā, WebEx

I have cursed WebEx for years:

• every time I waited ten minutes for the crappy ActiveX control or equally crappy Java applet to (fail to) load


• every time desktop sharing loaded but showed nothing


• every time I struggled to export a powerpoint document into its proprietary Universal (?!?) Communications Format with its Powerpoint plugin that never worked

why all that frustration? Just to control what page people look at during a powerpoint presentation, for the most part. Sometimes, rarely, for showing them an actual live application.

As with anything that truly pisses me off, I was once a fan. For one incandescent second in 1999 Webex was cool. But they never improved a damned thing. And fickle me, I've found a new shiny thing: Google Docs Presentations. For creating presentations it isn't much – you'd better not want more than bullet points – but for showing slides to others? Oh, bliss... just fire up the presentation and send the link to the attendees. So create your presentation in KeyNote, PowerPoint, or OpenOffice Presentation, save it in PowerPoint format, then upload it to Google Docs, and you're set. It is a beautiful thing. Bye-bye, WebEx, it was fun for a while.