I use the "subscribe to a search" feature in Bloglines to turn up nuggets of interest.
Searching for "disintermediation" comes up with an article or two every day. Many of them are mine ;)
Searching for "Skype" hits the 200-article limit every couple of hours.
Anyone who thinks they can roll a VoIP strategy without taking Skype into account has lost the plot.
Some more Skype musings, since I've got Skype on the brain at the moment...
Skype reminds me of a consumer packaged good company. It's more like Coca-Cola or Procter & Gamble than a telco. Their strategic differentiator is their sales and distribution method. Glugging another coke from the machine by the elevators is easier than hunting down a clean mug and boiling a kettle for coffee. P&G work hard to get their toothpaste on just the right shelf at Wal-Mart and 7-Eleven. Anyone can make sugar water and peppermint-flavoured microabrasives. Few people understand how to market and sell them.
Skype is about convenience, and putting new features within easy reach; leading users through small incremental advances in how they communicate.
You can also view Skype in two very different ways. A recent Analysys report talks about the class of "Private Voice Applications", of which Skype is an example. This is a node-centric view of the world -- Skype the PC software application. But looking through the other end of the telescope, you can view Skype as a virtual network -- just at the application layer, divorced from transport.
This takes us to a more familiar realm. Suddenly we start to see all those familiar network-centric terms and issues crop up -- interconnect, termination charges, roaming, vertical integration -- and have some more clues as to how Skype might gain market power and their business model evolve. The word "Skype" has this fuzzy definition that blurs the corporate, product and network identities. Just because we don't have a snappy buzzword for the Skype Network doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
In a similar vein, we lack another word in our vocabulary. A decade ago the Web burst upon us. HTTP as the protocol; Netscape as the user interface; the Web as the network of public HTTP-speaking nodes. SIP is an analog to HTTP. Softphones are similar to Netscape. But we don't have a word to describe the virtual network of public SIP-speaking nodes. If Mosaic and Netscape spawned the hypertext Web, the equivalent today would be the voice "Vob".
But the Vob is a failure to date. The number of open SIP nodes addressable via ENUM (or otherwise) is miniscule compared to the proprietary Skype virtual network. SIP has been absorbed by the telecom borg. At Sprint I watched Dynamicsoft struggle for a year to get a SIP push-to-talk engine to work. (Flarion demo'd a PTT app they whipped together in 2 days using standard Microsoft development tools, because they didn't need to bleed low-level optimisation across various layers of the stack.) Sprint is still probably working on pointless faux-smart network reincarnations on IP and SIP. Next-Generation Voice Network? You must be kidding. Last Generation Voice Network, maybe.
SIP is history as far as the future of voice is concerned. Get over it. The Vob is dead. Shuffled off to join the big pile of dead over-complex standards. DCE, CORBA -- please make some space between you, we've got company tonight.
Skype isn't this decade's Netscape either, because it isn't substitutable; they own their private Vob -- they've achieved what Microsoft failed to do with MSN and the Web. Yet they retain the strategic power Netscape had to reverse themselves from the client into various centralised server functions. (Yes my dears, even in P2P voice there's a pile of trust, directory and routing stuff that some people are going to want to do behind private barricades.)
It would be a tragic mistake to underestimate the potential market power Skype is accumulating. According to Skype's own figures from VON Canada, they're sustaining a growth rate of 1000% a year. Just another 2 years of this growth and they would have over 200 million concurrent users online. This is not beyond plausibility given how Skype and broadband are symbiotically driving adoption of one-another; the addressable market is exploding too.
That means even if you're a mega-telco -- a Verizon or a Vodafone -- you're screwed. You can create your own Private Voice Application, and start marketing it to your early-adopter users, but who ya gonna call? Ain't nobody but Skypers out there. Want some Skype presence in your Vodafone-branded VoIP app? Gonna cost ya!
I almost can't believe what I'm seeing unfold in front of my eyes. This time last year I was being rapped over the knuckles by corporate security for running Skype inside the Sprint corporate network. Somehow, I don't think they've got the joke yet.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 9:25 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Martin Geddes: SIP is the CORBA of VoIP from North American Bandwidth News
Martin, nails it as usual. Skype rules, SIP s*cks, might as well get used to it. The only way to ...
[Read more] Tracked on April 21, 2005 3:59 AM»
http://werbach.com/blog/archives/2005/04/it_would_be_a_t.html from Werblog
"It would be a tragic mistake to underestimate the potential market power Skype is accumulating." So says the always insightful Martin Geddes. He's right, and yet this mistake is still quite widespread....
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Skype & Telco Disintermediation from Zmetro.com
Martin Geddes:It would be a tragic mistake to underestimate the potential market power Skype is accumulating. According to Skype’s own figures from VON Canada, they’re sustaining a growth rate of 1000% a year. Just another 2 years of this g...
[Read more]
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Skype & Telco Disintermediation from Zmetro.com
Martin Geddes:It would be a tragic mistake to underestimate the potential market power Skype is accumulating. According to Skype’s own figures from VON Canada, they’re sustaining a growth rate of 1000% a year. Just another 2 years of this g...
[Read more]
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SkypeOpen service from noirExtreme
I've always been an admirer of Skype. I track the progress of the company since the launch of their first beta in 2003, praise their product in every occasion and yet I haven't adopted Skype.
Skype is about reinventing telecommunications, not ju
[Read more] Tracked on April 22, 2005 10:14 AM»
"SIP is history" from NQR: Quickies
"SIP is history"
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Martin's Skype Stirring from Skype Journal
Martin Geddes wrote two posts that are must reads for those not shy about thinking, promoting, or strategizing on Skype. Down under we used to say just "stirring" like stirring the pot. He's doing a little more than that. In the first post he points ou...
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SIP is Dead...Huh? from James Seng's Blog
Okay I admit I have been slow in the catching up with my blog last week. Tomorrow.sg is taking quite a bit of time (which btw, is coming along pretty well). But in my semi-absent last week,
[Read more] Tracked on April 24, 2005 3:16 PM