Tuesday, July 18, 2006

The chess pieces have been moving around the VoIP board for the last couple of hours.  I’ve recently gotten mail on:

• The Comcast Cablevision announcement that it has passed 1,000,000 VoIP subscribers.  Om Malik observes that this is putting pressure on the incumbent carriers, but also makes life much more difficult for Vonage.  Indeed, Cablevision operates in just a few states as compared with Vonage which is an international carrier.  Vonage stock is down again, now below $7.
• The Nortel / Microsoft announcement of a new research partnership, which, according to Microsoft VP Jeff Raikes, will ultimately result in the sale of new products and services through a joint channel.  Because it’s a research partnership, this will be a longer term play. However, public cloud presence plays, like Tello, are going to come under pressure as a result.  For now, the alliance’s focus on enterprise and carrier means that there is plenty of room to innovate, even though the stakes have just become higher.

 We live in interesting times.

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