Techdirt wrote this morning that the VoIP space is getting more crowded with Internet era bubble models. This was in response to an AP story about Jajah and Lycos titled New Ways to Call Over the Internet Debut. Meanwhile, on Friday TechWeb News published Gartner Sees Rocky Road Ahead For Telecoms. Elroy Jopling, the Gartner analyst quoted says:
Similar to the disruption music download sites, such as Napster, initially brought on the music industry, the telecommunication carriers, especially those in the "voice telephony market, will suffer the biggest shock," said Elroy Jopling, research director at Gartner.
All three of these pieces point to the same theme: the old telecoms are dying. Businesses may emerge from those ashes, branded the same way, but they won’t be the businesses we know today. The networks are becoming less and less of a barrier to applications. Models built on network scarcity are doomed. It’s the emergence of the Voice 2.0 model. During the transition period, we’re going to see lots of whacky business models.
I’ll be speaking on some of these themes at VON Canada next week. Monday at 10:45 I’ll be delivering an industry perspective speech, focused on Voice 2.0.
And in the meantime, as Andy Abramson says:
The key is for the goliaths to start to work like the new upstarts and move faster than battleships, while still covering the same ground.
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.
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This will be the main topic of my Industry Perspective at VON Europe 2006. It takes time, but the transiction is just beginning.
This is why the premise of the Voice Long Tail is important. Call it whatever you want, but it’s the apps that create new minutes that create incremental value for a user that will ultimately be the most interesting. Who knows, maybe VoIP ends up being the savior of the landline phone, and not its destructor. And yes, we will see some whacky business models and whacky terminology along the way.