I like a controversy, because that’s when we learn things.
In the ongoing debate I think we’ve lost sight of the original issue: separation of connectivity from applications. I’m a great proponent of this. Monopolies and markets above this in the stack concern me a lot less.
Skype’s network is proprietary, closed, and — yes — potentially downright dangerous in the long term. But I believe in dealing with reality as we find it, rather than an ideal world we wish we could conjure up. Pedant’s note: the Skype API opens the client UI, not the Skype network.
So far Skype isn’t particularly wedded to connectivity provision (with one exception). That means we don’t have to seek permission to use something else. Skype is a child of the Stupid Network, and self-centered as it may be we should be happy about this precocious toddler.
Enough of the B movie argument. Time of the main billing.
Being proprietary is no sin as long as the user is happy.
I admire Microsoft, and think most people whinge too much about Bill & co’s gazilions. People have forgotten how much word processors and operating systems used to cost, and how painful it was shopping for them. In the old days of the 80s and early 90s, Microsoft took expensive software and made cheaper mass-market versions. That’s a good thing.
When you buy MS Office, you’re not just buying a word processor. You’re buying the assurance that you can exchange editable documents with virtually any other business user. That’s a huge thing. With Windows, you’re buying the value of being able to employ almost anyone and know you don’t have to send them on a training course to understand what left-click and right-click might do. Microsoft’s officers and shareholders have only received a tiny sliver of the (without exaggeration) several trillions of dollars of value their standards have created.
The pattern is quite well-established. Beyond the obvious Word and Windows, SQL Server and Great Plains are more recent examples of how Microsoft has attempted to nibble away at the underbelly of my former-former employer, Oracle, by lowering prices and increasing volume. Microsoft’s products are great value for money.
I also admire Oracle. Proprietary? You betcha. But people haven’t been unloading their treasure onto Larry for nothing. Oracle does something very useful, and people are getting more value out of it than the price they pay, otherwise the revenue flow would stop. Open source alternatives, depite the hope and hype, have only nibbled at the fringes of the business. Oracle provide you with an assurance that your data will continue to be accessible for years to come, through many upgrade cycles of hardware, storage and OS. A vague hope that some voluntary collective (or tiny corporation with an experimental business model) will keep up the good work isn’t very reassuring in comparison.
I admire Skype. Predicable? Yessir - that’s me! It is successful because it solves the user’s problem. And that problem is a lot more than getting someone’s current IP address and creating a session and duplex audio channel. When you access Skype, it just works. (Err… ah. Except I’m currently Skypeless because it refuses to install the latest upgrade. Err. Um. No matter. Ignore the man behind the curtain.)
With Skype, there is no cognitive effort about having to purchase or provision the software. You can recommend it to friends without having to worry about them acquiring an incompatible version. Skype spreads because it does what the users want. It’s a cliche to say that people buy solutions to problems, not technology. Skype’s success suggests that those proffering alternatives failed to understand and solve the user’s problem. Some humility might be in order, not indignation.
That means there was a branding or marketing problem that had to be solved. And probably a usability one. Oh, and a compatibility one. And a nationalisation one. And a commercial one. Get the picture?
SIP does (almost) exactly what it says on the tin: it initiates (and tears down) sessions. No more, no less. The standard says nothing about the semantics of those sessions, or about stuff outside of the session protocol.
For example, one essential ingredient of a personal communications system is a means of limiting inbound calls on your attention. For this we have buddy lists and protocols for asking to join other peoples’ lists. Skype unifies the semantics of this: you know exactly what the other person’s experience will be, and you know it will work. (Anyone responding “XMPP/Jabber” will be given a good slap and asked to re-read this section: the absence of a unifying client means the semantics are not well-defined at the user level because you don’t know how the message will be consumed and presented at the other end; only the syntax and semantics of the machine-to-machine protocol. Machines != people.)
Skype has merely embraced and extended SIP inside a proprietary wrapper in order to solve a wider bunch of user problems. So does being a Skypehead make you the new Bellhead? Yes, but with the vital consideration that the end-to-end principle isn’t violated by Skype. Will be be getting the bill for Skype in five or ten years from now, just like we pay $60 to Bill G. when we buy a $300 PC in Wal-Mart. Possibly. But you’ll have banked a lot more value in the interim.
I wish I’d bought Microsoft stock early on, but my mind was poisoned against it by the horrors of FAR PASCAL pointers and the ugliness of Windows compared to the elegance of Unix. I’d now be a richer man if I’d seen the bigger picture.
I’m glad I worked for Oracle and got plenty of stock grants. I did very nicely out of it, thank you.
If Skype does an IPO, I’ll be calling my broker.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 02:07 PMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Skype's Proprietary Network from Phones
Good discussion on why it makes sense for Skype to keep its network closed....
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Telepocalypse: Perfectly and properly proprietary from Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog
Martin Geddes wraps up a discussion on SIP vs. Skype that has been raging among several VoIP-related blogs in the last few days, which at one point led some to question whether or not SIP was dead. My quick take,
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I too like controversy and love discussions.
I belong to the few who love to push the button: comment and leave a little piece of my thoughts in the blogs I visited.
"Think and you'll create the problem of disposal of ideas"
May be I have that problem...
I think your article centers the point and discusses it in a fair way.
It's easy to be onesided and difficult to see the matter in a balanced way.
Yes, Microsoft and Skype have in common the merit to have brought computing and VoIp to the masses.
Before MSDOS and later Windows there were just Mainframes and Unix, both far away to be "User friendly".
Before Skype there were other softphone like applications, but they lacked the "Marketing imprints" and the "User Friendliness" which made VoIP more like a "Mass Market" product and a cheap communication mean than a new technology.
But that is all, at least in my opinion.
Yes windows made the world of computing smaller, but also more limited.
At leat limmited to a monopolist OS.
Let's not make the same mistake.
Using open standard avoids the creation of a business model Telcos' like, where VoIP is a service offered by one company.
The In and Out of the Network are completely in the hands of the VoIP provider who can charge at his pleasure.
The model is exactly the same as the old telephony system.
You belong to a Network and the people who come in have to pay the "roaming" and you can call it in a different way and charge less, but at the end of the day it is exactly the same.
This was in a way unavoidable with the Telcos, because they owned the infrastructures and you had to pay a "toll" to use them.
Different is the case with VoIP.
Finally we can talk of "Customers' owned infrastructure" or, if you want, leased, but anyway they do not belong to the VoIP provider.
Why building a Network in the Network, while what the customer only needs is something to direct his calls?
Why does he have to pay "tolls" for usig something he already pays for?
The Network,(the infrastructures) is already there, it is called "Internet" and the hardware can be a computer with an open standard (SIP or H323, or whatever) software or, even better and quite cheap a simple IP phone.
The VoIP provider can be whoever is willing to provide a gatekeeper (open standard which can deal with the various codecs).
And to do so, millions of small VoIP providers with standard codecs can do the job much better than somebody who wants to monopolize the Market.
The Computer before and the Internet later are the revolution of our century.
A revolution in the sense that harware have become so cheap to be accessible to everybody.
To make a company you do not need anymore expensive premises or a big funding.
You just need brain, knowledge and initiative.
That is the revolution.
No more few big dinasaurs, but millions of new entrereneurs.
The Market should be in the hands of many and with the Internet and VoIP it can.
Why loosing a chance to make a Revolution when it is still possible?
Why repeating the mistakes of the past?
Patrizia
http://woip.blogspot.com
Posted by: at April 27, 2005 11:10 AM