Spark's biggest problem is a lack of vision and leadership. No one person or group will take responsibility for decisions and direction, inevitably leading to management by a number of essentially focus groups. Do you know how hard it is to develop a product when 10 different PMs are all insisting their features have the highest priority? Ridiculous. Matrix management to duck responsibility.
It could be turned around but someone needs to start saying no occasionally.
Spark is just fine apart from a few monitor issues, main issue is the old school users who are drugged and addicted to email. Plain and simple
RT and co have a serious NIH syndrome. Witness the "viral" video he did a year or so ago disparaging the existing IoT strategy with his impression of the Cisco sales guy going "hey, you want a router with that?!". That was so below the belt and discouraging to the tons of very smart engineers who had worked their butts off in helping open up new buying centers outside of our traditional IT stomping grounds and actually helping Cisco move into line of business sales (witness the quickly dying partnerships now with the likes of Rockwell, Itron and others.) Now IoT=Jasper for Cisco under RT's empire building umbrella, and Jasper is out making announcements that they will help corporate customers manage their smartphone usage. WTF?!
Well, as I always say, "That boy can't tell Spark from Shinola."
Have never, never seen or heard of a customer using Spark...
Who is taking bets if RT will be at GSX? Not sure there is anything to unveil except more Spark. Unfortunately it is outright heresy to say the strategy isn't brilliant.
I thought the biggest problem with Spark was that it was a steaming turd.
I'm laid off and outside cisco at this point, 20 years UC experience....., so I'll play devil's advicate, but don't customers like Slack? And want it? So isn't our vision and strategy correct, we just can't execute? Slack is going through the roof so much that Cisco, Microsoft and google have caught on. So spark is there in the ballpark, right?
The Collab "leadership" team has plenty of vision. Unfortunately, their vision is dead wrong and customers could care less about the product. The Spark team is too stubborn to admit they're wrong and they won't admit the ship is sinking fast. The team wasn't interested in leveraging what made WebEx successful nor were they interested in what customers wanted. Their main motivation was to do things their way. Well, you reap what you sow.
Spark's biggest problem is that it's a lousy product with plenty of stronger competition.
Well I agree with the leadership incompetence but surely another reason is that it is simply and utterly rubbish? And really really expensive rubbish at that!