I had a web conference with Brian Donahoo of Citrix Online yesterday, and he outlined the reasons that GoToMeeting has become the fastest growing product that the company has offered, eclipsing the monumentally sucessful GoToMyPC, and the lesser known but very widely adopted GoToAssist. The story within the story is not the technology itself, per se -- although what has been developed is impressive, and I will discuss certain functionality later on.

The inner story is in a way, commonsensical. I asked the obvious question: "Why did you choose to enter a crowded marketplace, with a bunch of well-entrenched competitors, and the imminent possibiltiy of a market consolidation around offerings like LiveMeeting and WebEx?" The answer: Citrix went out and surveyed existing, former, and potential users of online conferencing solutions and discover several very critical and unmet needs:

1. The solutions availble were generally not easy to use by attendees.
   
2. The solutions were considered by many to be expensive, relative to actual use; and worse, the expense is highly variable, with all sorts of additional charges that occur based on exceedingly difficult-to-track limits.
   
3. While many large companies have adopted web conferencing, mid size and small companies have not.
   
4. The solutions available were not oriented toward ad hoc use, but more so toward programmed and scheduled conferences.

So Citrix determined to develop a technology to meet these needs, and to satisfy the large and growing Mid size and SoHo market niches. Based on the technologies that underlie GoToMyPC and GoToAssist, they were able to develop GoToMeeting in a very short time, and to leverage their deep expertise in high performance hosted solutions.

The fee structure: a flat rate of $39/mo for 1 organizer to be able to have an unlimited number of unlimited duration meetings that can have up to 10 attendees. Or for those that need larger meetings, or need to have more than a single organizer, there is a Corporate version of the solution.

They have integrated a free conference calling service, where yout attendees are charged for the call, although with the Corporate version, you can arrange for an alternate telephone service where attendees will not be charged.

I found the tool almost effortless to use. A small client (above) runs on your desktop, something like an IM client, and you can simply invite people to join your "meeting" -- which is basically your shared desktop. When collapsed there is just a tiny panel that looks something like a minimized media player (below).

Once a session is open, you can then run any program, like Powerpoint, and display your screen. You can switch presenters, and the other person can display his screen, or alternately you can cede control of your keyboard/mouse to the other person, and they can control your app.

Invitations are either by email, or through a copy/paste technique you can IM folks to join. Brian showed me a plugin for Outlook, which makes invitations easier.

Very slick, very minimal and flexible. I like it.

Obviously, I still want more, like integrated video, audio, and recording/playback, as well as a more sophisticated integration with IM clients along the lines of what they have contrived for Outlook. But what they have is more than enough for what I want to do, and because of the "switch presenters" mechanism, I will now be able to ask people who want to give me demos (and I get like four or five per week) to use my solution, instead of having to download all sorts of strange, slow, and fragile clients. I was getting a demo a few weeks ago, and the client had to try two different services before finally emailing me a presentation and having me click through as he announced "next."