During CES, Om Malik hammered out a fabulous rant on VoIP silos. He talked about how the choices VoIP providers are making which tie specific pieces of hardware to their services only are limiting choices for consumers. Pulver followed this up with a specific dissection of how Skype is limiting choice by not investing enough in their ecosystem. And, while I chaired the VoIP and IM panel at CES, I heard repeatedly from Microsoft, and Yahoo that while they were "committed" to more open interop between networks and applications it would have to be done cautiously in order to be done "safely". The spectre of SPIM/SPIT (spam on IM / ip telephony) was given as the reason.
There is a land grab underway, no doubt. Otherwise I wouldn’t have to run Skype, Gizmo, MSN, Vling, Google Talk, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger just to talk with the people I regularly interact with. What this reminds me of is the early days of the browser wars. Netscape and Microsoft engaged in a battle of releasing conflicting HTML tags in order to make content sticky to one browser or the other. It wasn’t until the W3C standardized HTML that progress really accelerated. Let’s hope that VoIP / IM vendors get through this current phase of silo building quickly. It’s not helpful to consumers or network operators.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
