As a little diversion, I’d like to just expand on the “moving beyond the old phone network” theme. Is Skype and its ilk really making use of the stupid network, or does the power of VoIP just derive from arbitrage of telco pricing?
Purely as an example, let’s take Phil Wolff’s recent wishlist for Skype voicemail features. This is not meant to be a critique or discussion of the feature requests. I am solely using this as fodder to gauge how “stupid” our feature requests are, and the list is conveniently long enough to make a good sample size.
Below is the list, somewhat edited and abridged. In each case I’ve classified the feature into one of four buckets:
I use the abbreviation VM for voicemail. You may disagree with some of the individual classifications. It doesn’t make much difference to the overall picture.
| Feature | Type | Notes |
| Let me save VM to my hard disk | Hybrid | Must download offline, can’t initiate via telephone keypad |
| Email VM to a friend | Hybrid | Almost impossible to enter an email address via keypad or voice recognition |
| Send VM to another [Skype] user | Equivalence | Standard feature of VM today |
| Playback effects, pause button | Inferior | Can you remember which number is pause? |
| Play back during another conversation | Inferior | Technically possible, but very messy |
| Speech-to-text preview | Impossible | By definition, requires a non-voice UI |
| Situational welcome messages | Hybrid | Too hard to provision address book categories without web UI |
| Set welcome greetings by group | Hybrid | Ditto |
| Messages tied to my Skype status/availability | Inferior | Possible on mobile networks (phone on/off), but very limited |
| Time of day greetings | Equivalence | Easily provisioned via keypad |
| Alternate languages | Inferior | Can try to guess based on caller ID country code, or provision manually, but nothing like interactive “Accept-Language” |
| Priority calls | Inferior | Can set ringtones on fixed and mobile to imitate this, but hard to use and configure |
| More notification of voicemail receipt | Hybrid | Notification channels may be non-PSTN |
| FTP a copy of my voicemails to a web server | Hybrid | By definition, based on IP |
| Interactive Voice Response | Equivalence | Standard VM feature today (“to set further options, press star”) |
| Audio slam book | Equivalence | Just like automated telemarketing today |
| Charge money | Equivalence | There are special PSTN tariffs that more-or-less achieve this already |
| All strangers go to voice mail | Equivalence | Easily provisioned VM feature |
| “Record This Call” button | Equivalence | A bit kludgy (e.g. *** breakout menu from calls), but doable |
So, what are the scores on the doors?
| Equivalence | PSTN can do it, well | 7 |
| Inferior | PSTN can do it, badly | 5 |
| Hybrid | PSTN can do it with a Web back-end | 6 |
| Impossible | PSTN can’t do it | 1 |
Now, if we were really serious about moving beyond the PSTN, there would be a lot more “impossible [for the PSTN]” feature requests. Methinks there’s still a lot of room for the re-invention of this space, and thinking is very much constrained by how we’ve done things in the past.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:49 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Great post!
While this is clearly an interesting metric I think it is reasonable to factor in the cost and difficulty of adding some features to the PSTN - some items, although possible on the PSTN, are seriously difficult to implement.
We also need to get ourselves out of the expectations of telephony and worry more deeply about the expectations of communications. More anthropology types (Bonnie Nardi comes to mind) and CHI types need to be thinking about this space. It took a long time for people to become comfortable with the rigid world of the PSTN and it will take some time (and a few killer applications) to move past it.
Posted by: at April 24, 2005 01:16 PM