Video calling has been six months away from replacing business travel since roughly 1964, when the picturephone was demonstrated at a world’s fair to people who assumed the future had arrived.
Every generation since has produced better hardware and the same prediction, and the prediction keeps failing. The bandwidth is available now. Cameras are fitted to laptops as standard. The picture is good. None of the obstacles people used to cite still apply, and it has still not replaced very much.
I think the reason is that a video call is worse than a telephone call for most of what calls are for.
A phone call is cheap in attention. You can take one while walking, look something up mid-sentence, glance at a document, or simply stop arranging your face for a moment. Nobody knows and nobody is offended. That low cost is the whole reason the telephone became the default for talking to people you are not near.
Video removes all of it. You must appear engaged for the duration. You must be somewhere presentable. You are watching yourself in a corner of the screen, which nobody enjoys and everybody does. And you cannot make eye contact, because the camera sits above the screen and the eyes you want to meet are on it, so both parties spend the call appearing to look slightly past each other.
That last one is not a small defect. The thing video was supposed to add is the human signal, and the arrangement of the equipment specifically breaks the strongest human signal there is.
Where it does work is worth looking at, because it clarifies the point. The expensive installations, the ones with a dedicated room and matched furniture and cameras positioned to put everyone at eye level, are genuinely effective. They also cost as much as a small house, and they are bought by companies that compare them against a year of transatlantic flights rather than against a phone call.
So the market is not people who would otherwise ring each other. It is people who would otherwise get on an aeroplane, and that is a much smaller and much richer market than the one everyone keeps forecasting.
Video calling will find its place as the thing you do with family abroad, where seeing the person is the entire purpose and nobody minds looking slightly past the camera. For meetings, the telephone is going to keep winning, and it will keep being described as a failure of adoption rather than a preference.