A totally non-actionable, useless, pie-in-the-sky thought.
Old fashioned desk phones are a bit like thin-client web terminals. A limited set of UI functions are communicated to a central, smart server. Management costs are minimised as a result.
The stupid network wants to invert all of this, and make the edges smart. When the telephony application is in a state of rapid flux, replacing a $100 device with a new, smarter $100 device is much less intimidating than risking the upgrade of a $10,000 PBX in the hope you've picked the right feature set. We've taken to using $1000 laptop PCs as telephones to get the functions we desire, because they're more adaptable, and the change can be done with free or cheap software upgrades.
But there's that little niggling issue of manageability of heterogenous distributed network devices. So I just wonder ... could the idea of a "thin client" smartphone be feasible? Say you want a desk telephony device that can display Skype buddy presence, for example. Is the device itself the best place to put the Skype-specific application logic? Or is a device with a few softkeys, and a stripped-down web browser or Flash-type interface a better bet, interfacing to a server of some kind out there in the cloud?
There's an unresolveable tension here. The stupid network is adaptable to change, and small incremental change at the edge is quicker than large change in the core; but change costs money, and co-ordinated change managed centrally can reap economies of scale. So as the level of uncertainty drops about what customers want out of Voice 2.0 over the next 5 or 10 years, expect to see the architecture shift accordingly.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 11:29 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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