{"id":3567,"date":"2019-07-11T07:22:42","date_gmt":"2019-07-11T14:22:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/?p=3567"},"modified":"2019-07-11T07:22:42","modified_gmt":"2019-07-11T14:22:42","slug":"small-steps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.poly.com\/small-steps\/","title":{"rendered":"Small Steps…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with my Poly<\/a> colleagues Casey King<\/a> and Tim Root<\/a> for an episode of AVNationTV\u2019s Connected<\/a>!<\/a> that discussed the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of the moon landing.\u00a0 The three of us weren\u2019t even teenagers yet when the historic Apollo 11 mission landed the first humans on the moon and brought them safely home, but it had a tremendous impact on all of us.<\/p>\n

When Casey, Tim and I get together, it\u2019s definitely a geek-fest.\u00a0 Between the three of us, we\u2019ve worked in the engineering departments of such firms as Apple, AMD, Lifesize, Magic Leap, Huddly, Picture Tel, Polycom, Vgo, Revolabs \/ Yamaha, FNN, Bloomberg, NYU<\/em>, and of course now Poly.\u00a0 We\u2019re definitely the guys that would tell you how to build a watch if you asked us what time it was, the ones that knew how to make our VCR clock stop flashing, and people that still receive the \u2018tech support\u2019 calls from friends and family as soon as anything goes wrong.\u00a0 A great deal of that engineering approach and personality comes from growing up in the era of space travel.\u00a0 Unlike our parents, we were born into a world where something impossible just meant no one had successfully done it yet \u2013 not that it couldn\u2019t be done.<\/p>\n

When Neil Armstrong put mankind\u2019s first footprint on the moon \u2013 and told us about it on his \u201cSnoopy cap\u201d embedded Plantronics MS-50 headset<\/a> \u2013 he didn\u2019t take credit for it as an individual achievement.\u00a0 His words told us it was only one small step for him, but a giant leap for mankind.\u00a0 He was correct of course.\u00a0 All giant leaps in technology and achievement come to us as a series of small steps, each building on the last one\u2026to go just that much further than was achieved before.\u00a0 That headset itself was just another result of a series of small steps, starting with \u2019Pacific Plantronics\u2019 creating a better aviation headset, to an astronaut (Wally Schirra) noticing it and asking for a space version, to engineers making that headset a reality.<\/a><\/p>\n

Casey, Tim and I chatted about how our entire approach to engineering came from the NASA approach to reaching the moon.\u00a0 How each project is separated into its component \u2018small steps\u2019 and each one of those is tackled before we move on to the next.<\/p>\n

It is the same approach that we use to this day with the development of collaboration technologies.\u00a0 For example, Poly\u2019s new 4K Eagle Eye Cube<\/a> wasn\u2019t just invented out of thin air.\u00a0 It is the giant leap ahead that came from one of the first commercially viable videoconferencing systems (the Picture-Tel Concorde<\/a>), then the first camera in history that could track a room\u2019s active speaker and automatically frame a shot of just him or her (the Polycom Eagle Eye Director<\/a>), then the push to remove the mechanical PTZ from the process.\u00a0 It is one of many cameras on the market nowadays that can perform speaker tracking and automatic framing, but unlike most of them it has the intelligence built-in. It doesn\u2019t require extra software running on a connected PC.<\/p>\n

Or, for another example, take a look at the Polycom Studio<\/a> huddle-room solution.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t just blow-away the competition in the camera \/ speakerbar space just because we wanted it to.\u00a0 It incorporates Polycom\u2019s awesome NoiseBlock<\/a> and Acoustic Fence<\/a> technologies \u2013 innovations that were developed years earlier to prevent extraneous noise (typing, paper shuffling, etc.) and open office sounds from distracting a meeting\u2019s participants.\u00a0 Each of these were a small step towards creating the best device in its class on the market, as shown by winning the \u201cbest communications \/ collaboration device\u201d designation at Enterprise Connect<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At Poly we will continue to stack-up these small steps as we improve our products and bring new offerings to the market.\u00a0 Each one will surely not rival the historic journey to the moon, but put enough of them together and we may just surprise you at how quickly we rocket past the competition in the collaboration space.<\/p>\n

(Be sure to catch Casey, Tim and David\u2019s chat on AVNationTV<\/a>, and join Poly as we celebrate the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of landing on the moon.)<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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