Megan: It's just so impactful, isn't it, in so many different ways. I mean, Chris, how are you seeing these research results reflected as companies work through digital and AI transformations? What is it that leaders need to understand about what is involved in audio implementation across their organization?
Chris: Well, like I said earlier, I do think that audio is finally maybe getting its place in the spotlight a little bit up there with our cousins over in the video side. Audio, it's not just a peripheral aspect anymore. It's a very integral part of that sort of comprehensive collaboration plan I was talking about earlier. And when we think about how can we contribute solutions that are really more easy to use for our end users, because if you create something complicated, we were talking about the days gone by of walking into a room. It's a very complicated system, and you need to find the right person that knows how to run it. Increasingly, you just need to have some plug and play kind of solutions. We're thinking about a more sustainable strategy for our solutions where we make really high-quality hardware. We've done that account for a hundred years. People will come up to me and tell the story of the SM58 microphone they bought in 1980 and how they're still using it every day.
We know how to do that part of it. If somebody is willing to make that investment upfront, put some high-quality hardware into their system, then we are getting to the point now where updates can be handled via software downloads or cloud connectivity. And just really being able to provide sort of a sustainable solution for people over time.
More in our industry, we're collaborating with other industry partners to go in that direction, make something that's very simple for anybody to walk into a room or on their individual at home setup and do something pretty simple. And I think we have the right industry groups, the right industry associations that can help make sure that the ecosystems have the proper standards, the right kind of ways to make sure everything is interoperable within a system. We're all kind of heading in that direction with that end user in mind.
Megan: Fantastic. And when the internet of things was emerging, efforts began to create sort of these data ecosystems, it seems there's an argument to be made that we need audio ecosystems as well. I wonder, Chris, what might an audio ecosystem look like and what would be involved in implementation?
Chris: Well, I think it does have to be part of that bigger ecosystem I was just talking about where we do collaborate with others in industry and we try to make sure that we're all playing by the kind of same set of rules and protocols and standards and whatnot. And when you think about compatibility across all the devices that sit in a room or sit in your, again, maybe your at home setup, making sure that the audio quality is as good as it can be, that you can interoperate with everything else in the system. That's just become very paramount in our day-to-day work here. Your hardware has to be scalable like I just alluded to a moment ago. You have to figure out how you can integrate with existing technologies, different platforms.
We were joking when we came into this session that when you're going from the platform at your company, maybe you're on Teams and you go into a Zoom setting or you go into a Google setting, you really have to figure out how to adapt to all those different sort of platforms that are out there. I think the ecosystem that we're trying to build, we're trying to be on that equal footing with the rest of the components in that system. And people really do understand that if you want to have extra functionalities in meetings and you want to be able to transcribe or take notes and all of that, that audio is an absolutely critical piece.
Megan: Absolutely. And speaking of bit of all those different platforms and use cases, that sort of audio is so relevant to Genevieve that goes back to this idea of in audio one size does not fit all and needs may change. How can companies also plan their audio implementations to be flexible enough to meet current needs and to be able to grow with future advancements?