November 19, 2006
OPINION://Chinese whispers
The recent Skype 3.0 beta release for Windows is a strange beast. You know that it isn’t the real thing — there has to be something much more significant in the pipeline that integrates Paypal, eBay and merchant sites. You can’t justify a multi-billion dollar price tag off a faux prepaid calling card business.
The public chat and Skypecast feature puzzle me. One of the things I do for a living is to help align vision, strategy, product, and customer needs. The vision for Skype as a business must now be “provide the best consumer-to-business communications experience”, since eBay and Paypal are pure transaction companies. Without ads or alignment with any of the social network players, there’s zippo money in consumer-to-consumer talk. These features are kind of cool, but wouldn’t have passed my project pipeline management filter. They don’t make the network grow much faster, or take out some pain point of adoption. Indeed, if anything they’re an attack of feeping creaturism, where the product’s original appeal of simplicity is slowly corrupted by new whizzbang addons that only 2% of people use. In their defense, it’s nice to see features that put clear blue water between Skype and Telephony 1.0 — just these aren’t the best of choices.
Now, the good news is that there are far more significant innovations in Skype 3.0.
The smaller one is that finally the browser plug-in to make phone numbers in web pages callable really works. So when I checked out the opening times of my bank yesterday, I got this:
Note how it’s even taken the context of “Fax” to not highlight certain numbers. (Although I’d dearly like a print-to-fax-SkypeOut feature, please!)
The other innovation is more subtle. Take a look at the standard in-call screen:
Now that “Do more” drop down…
OK, I’m up early (4am today, although I did go to bed at 6pm with the jetlag), and my brother is up late. Let’s play. (I gave up playing chess and cards years ago once it became clear I wasn’t going to win against him any more.)
(Click to view in new window. This seems to be a problem in blogging of separating content from presentation — I want my tool to know that you can put the full-size image in the RSS feed, but it’s too wide to fit in the column of the blog. Ho hum…)
Note that I can invite others to observe the game (names airbrushed out to save embarrassment of public association with myself):
Well, so what? you ask. Here’s why Chinese Checkers is important. We’ve now entered a fundamentally different mode of communications. The “telephony” experience is supposed to be a substitute for actually being there in person. Yet you can’t really play such games over the telephone. We’ve added a “see what I see” capability. It only takes a few more steps to be able to gesticulate and annotate. This is a richer and more social experience.
You can imagine this experiment being extended to commercial sites. I get presented with pictures of products, forms to fill in, co-navigation with a sales rep of the catalogue. That’s what drives the deep differentiation from Telephony 1.0. Why would I call the 800 number and be forced to navigate some awful IVR, then dictate my name and address in my strange foreign accent to someone half a world away, and have tell them my credit card number and security code — when I can Skype them instead? The eBay merchant base isn’t heavily invested in Avaya call centre equipment. This is the perfect seed from which to grow the disruption that blows apart the telephony business. The telcos are out buying IMS equipment to try to sell you trivial new call routing features at high margins. In the meantime, someone builds a new business on a green field far away, and the telecom industry never understood that they were at the losing end of the game: nobody explained the rules of Chinese Checkers, Skype style.
UPDATE: More interesting stuff on Skype-enabled collaborative working here. Remember, voice is just a feature, not the application. As Stuart Henshall was reminding me a few weeks ago, the money’s at the meeting point of collaboration, communication and commerce. (Tomi and Alan would no doubt add ‘community’, but I’m still trying to work out whether that’s an input or an emergent output of the other three.) Skype is good on communications, but still weak at collaboration and commerce — but the trends are in the right direction, if a bit slow at times.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 05:05 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Not sure I agree on "You can’t justify a multi-billion dollar price tag off a faux prepaid calling card business"
Myself and IDT corp would probably beg to differ with you on that one Martin.
Otherwise excellent post thanks
I'm just glad that at long, long, long last the Linux version no longer works like early beta software. It's now at least minimally functional, in that its audio handling is usable and finally free of crippling bugs. It can even provide an audible indication of an incoming call, a feature that I believe is sometimes known as "ringing." For a program that is all about audio, you'd think that would have gotten more attention. I assume the Windows version must have worked better, sooner, for Skype to have gotten so much attention.
Posted by: at November 22, 2006 11:01 PMYes but IDT last time I was onsite (NJ) told me that they make 80% of the worlds calling cards, so I doubt there is room for lots of big players at that level. If you know Serge A. - say hello - I've been meaning to contact him about some future of telephony training! Lee.
Posted by: at November 22, 2006 11:21 PM