It’s election time here in the UK, and the media are required to give a “balanced picture” by offering equal time to the main parties.
So in case you think I’ve gone completely Skype nuts, here’s a few balancing news items.
I had a Skype conference call with a client a few days ago. It was embarassingly bad, mainly because one of the participants was on a flaky hotel Wi-Fi link. In the vertically integrated telco model, this would be the telcos problem. Skype’s layered model tends to push them towards a “not our problem” approach. Mistake! The Skype client needs to be aware of the connectivity quality underneath it. If it can’t deliver, and is disrupting a conf call, then it needs to inform the participant, end the call, or somehow manage the situation. Skype needs to manage the user experience better, even the bits they don’t have control over.
I’m also having too many Skype calls where I need to re-dial to get a better connection. Plus I’ve had several failed SkypeOut calls (what is a 10040 error, or whatever it was, I don’t know — but that’s not my idea of a great user experience).
Skype also has some blind spots and weaknesses. It’s a winner so far at consumer-to-consumer chat, both for close buddies and strangers. Yet there’s space for Google to build a C2B VoIP service (“click here to talk to Acme Rotavtor Supplies”), Microsoft to federate their RTC/Outlook universe (B2B2B2B^n), and the PSTN to soldier on as the B2C preferred means of contact. Skype’s assumption that all calling is free doesn’t jive well with what we’re seeing elsewhere.
That said, some of Skype’s competition don’t get that “great user experience” idea. Yahoo have some dreadful advertising pop-up in their IM client, and you have to hunt for a configuration setting to turn it off. They litter their IM client with irrelevant crap. They force-feed users on upgrades to try to sell them BT’s VoIP services. And the webcam experience in Yahoo — and its ability to deal with firewalls and NAT — sucks like grandma’s lost her dentures. Last time I tried their voice client, it wasn’t good. Skype does things like automatic volume control very well.
In our world of toothpase, Yahoo is the cap that rolls off into the sink, the tube that splits in your toiletries bag, and the dispenser that squirts a bit too much out when you squeeze the end. Skype has the perfect flip-cap, a tube that stands on its end, and even tastes good.
I’d also like to clarify one thing… I said:
Anyone who thinks they can roll a VoIP strategy without taking Skype into account has lost the plot.
What I mean is that you need to take it into account, not necessarily automatically embrace it. If you’re a telco, it means either fighting or co-opting Skype in some way. (What to know how - click here.)
Skype isn’t perfect. It hasn’t taken the feature set very far past the PSTN. (What can you do in Skype but can’t do with an all-you-can-eat PSTN plan and an IM client?) But the bar anyone else needs to cross is raising out of reach real fast. You’re not only going to have to outflank Skype in product features and usability, but you’re going to have to outdistribute Skype when Skype has an army of tens of millions of pushers already in its grasp.
No matter how much you love SIP and ENUM, there’s no “Perfect for the VoB” sticker on a box in Costco that assures you your SIP phone will interoperate with the rest of the universe, and that it’ll fulfill your full set of needs (voicemail, call control, etc.). The Vob is a marketing failure, not a technology one. The “promise” isn’t clear and the brand non-existent. Compare to WiFi, whose ascent is as much an accident of cute naming as meeting customer need. Also score another similarity between Skype and Microsoft — the genius of both is not the technology, it’s the sales and marketing.
As far as I’m concerned, Skype’s well past the Mum Test — my mother is now getting her friends onto Skype. If you dismiss or ignore Skype, flawed as it may be, you do it at your peril.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:34 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Features … Again from Aswath Weblog
Martin Geddes observes that “[Skype] hasn’t taken the feature set very far past the PSTN.” He goes on to suggest that currently Skype can’t do much beyond what one can do with all-you-can-eat PSTN plan and an IM client. Indeed...
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One last follow up comment, then I'll return to the real land of work :) From my perspective the companies that will outflank Skype, Microsoft & the telco's in North America will be the cable companies. They are having an enormously successful run with packaged services, including mobile, ip access and television, and already have an order of magnitude more customers than Skype.(maybe two) Their business model becomes much more successful when they bundle all of their available services together, they limit consumer turnover.
I don't think Skype will fit into that model, what the cable companies want to do is integrate the entire media experience on one bill, and motivate customers to do so. Right now the motivation is discount pricing for bundles, but that's not going to earn them money in the future. The next level of integration is where the differentiation starts, and where things get interesting.
I believe the model will be service integration, the kind of 'magic' where you integrate your mobile / tv experience. ie while watching a movie all calls go to message, or on screen etc. Those examples are trivial, but I think there will 100's of trivial services deployed initially until we start converging on some that people will pay for.
The SIP interop concerns are valid, but I think the industry is currently driving to those standards as a cost necessity. Eventually someone will get big enough to either a) imitate or b) buy Skype (cisco?) and combine that with their other services. When that happens Skype will need to interop with the next carrier standards, and try to keep up with the sprouting regulation. I think SIP is for better or worse winning the standards war, which often determines the winner.
Don't get me wrong, I'm going to install Skype as well and get it started. But I expect to have something from my cable company in the mail in ~1-2 years that will have me using something else. (and chucking my telco bill with glee ...)
John.
Posted by: at April 21, 2005 02:03 PMThe Internet replaces regional quasi-monopolies with global ones.
barnes & noble - amazon
your local library - google
trad. telco - Skype
If Skype kills the competition, they will soon behave
like a monopolist. There will be annoying unfixed bugs
and missing features that are available in other clients
(which will be useless for real work as the whole world
uses Skype). Even if Microsoft does not take over the
company.
It is not explicitly identified that this entry is prompted by Om Malik’s entry ( http://www.gigaom.com/2005/04/20/skype-and-destroy-sip/ ) in his blog; but the concluding paragraph kind of gives it away. Having commented on his blog entry, I would like to elaborate on my comments in light of the points you make here.
In the previous posts you identified the good things of Skype and in this post some of the things that they have to work on. It is my conclusion that you feel that on the whole Skype has got it good. I might be rash but that is my impression. This is disappointing from a major advocate of “intelligence at the end point” philosophy. I feel that a person like you should be appalled that so many are willing to signup for a Skype monopoly without realizing so. Shouldn’t you be using your bully pulpit (as measured by Bloglines) to educate us mere mortals? After all said and done, Skype controls our identity and decides the circle of our communication network. Shouldn’t we be protesting against this rather than succumbing to it?
This leads to the more important concern I have in your last post. Specifically I am referring to your parenthetical statement: “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.” For me this suggests that there is a need for a third party to mediate trust and directory; in other words there can not be a “stupid network” for this arbiter can (will?) insert itself in every transaction with the resultant negative consequences. I am not willing to argue whether that is the case or not. But I am puzzled that the “stupid network” school is not fighting this as vigorously as it did against the “bellheads”.
Posted by: at April 21, 2005 03:54 PMAs a recent Skype subscriber who's primarily using a SkypeIn / voicemail combo, I noticed the comment "What can you do in Skype but can’t do with an all-you-can-eat PSTN plan and an IM client?"
One feature that I never had with my old wireless provider is the ability to blacklist callers. It's not a perfect implementation, and Caller ID did let me guess who might be calling my mobile and respond appropriately, but this is a lot closer to what I always wanted --- a single command called "Never let this person talk to me again"!
Posted by: at April 21, 2005 04:36 PM