<sarcasm>
we've been hearing that the last two years, and it's still early in the year, but i'll give voip another year before it really takes off. having just installed an AT&T callvantage box and patching it into the rest of the existing jacks in my house has been a fun little project, but probably a little much for the average person. i consider myself an early adopter and i haven't fooled much with voip until now.
it still has some issues. at&t had a bear of a time getting my service connected - it took a good 45 minutes on the phone one day for a tech to connect it live - and in the end it about 95% works.
things like *98 are missed ( i can't get the advertised "***" to retrieve voicemail to work) , and privacy manager should just be a free feature in the software. if they are going to nickel and dime you for all the add-ons, what's the point, really?
when my wife is on the phone for an hour i definitely notice a big drop in the bandwidth for browsing.
and then there's skype. skype is going to be huge. why? because they have the network. i can't swing a dead cat these days in the bizdev world without someone asking me for a skype account, especially when dealing with partners in Europe. it doesn't really matter if someone comes out with a better technology. so many people are tied to their skype handles now - they are creating an awesome level of lock in. what's amazing is that some people just use skype as IM - even some people i suggested using IM to communicate with a year ago are now asking to IM me via skype after they blowing off IM for all these years.
skype should take a history lesson in AOL and AIM carefully. AOL clearly had the lead in the instant messenger market with tremendous lock in, even outside of AOL proper with the standalone AIM product. everyone i knew used AIM so thus did i (we still use AIM today in our office, even though all of us have y!m accounts as well). AOL even bought their only real competitor at the time, ICQ, but proceeded to do nothing to integrate the two products! then, they shutdown their open APIs, caused a lot of ill will keeping out the reverse engineers and let Y! and MSN eventually stomp all over them.
AOL could have easily won the war early by allowing other applications to communicate with their API over their TIC/TOC and Oscar protocols ( i still have screen scrapes of their original java client libraries that did exist) because people would have stayed with the messenger that that brought them the most value for both p2p and a2p ... but by the time AOL figured that out, it was way too late.
skype has it's issues too, though. i'm a pacer on the phone. i need to have a handset to my ear walking around, and i work in an open environment with WOXY happily playing in the background, so answering skype at my desk isn't really possible.
i like the direction motorola and skype have taken in announcements, and maybe this move will finally be the one move that frees them from the clutches of the cell carrier's demands, especially now that iDen has been put out to pasture - but will we see anything any time soon?
voip. next year, for sure.
Posted by Steve at February 21, 2005 11:58 PM | TrackBack
