| Ecademy Clubs: Skype Directory Club - Forum : It would appear Skype is miles ahead in terms of numbers and has potential to become a de facto standard for PC PC voip. Skype has a unique propriety standard that is scalable (?). However, what about competitors? It's a fairly easy game to get into and the only commitment Skype has are paying clients and the fact that my contacts use Skype too. Could a competitor deplete Skype growth? Will corp users prefer the enterprise MS product with full integration to existing MS products? Could a competitor build a Skype compatible product without calling it Skype? Perhaps Skype should move to the licensing route to rubber stamp that de facto standard? Two things make this difficult - Installed base. It's critical with an app like this that you can call your friends who have the same system installed. - Quality. Skype have raised the bar and it's not trivial any more to compete. Scenarios that might topple them. - The SIP community come up with a communal directory, there's some common way of busting NAT and firewalls, a common standard for encrypting coalesces around Phil Zimmerman and gpg and multiple alternate clients appear that are good enough. All four tasks look pretty hard but perhaps Gizmo can lead the way. With Jabber contributing the decentralised but communal directory. - Microsoft swallow their desire to make money from partners and open up MSN again so that it can talk to any SIP partner rather than just seleceted paid services. They build NAT and firewall busting into Longhorn as a service or switch wholesale to IPv6. Don't hold your breath. I don't think they want to be a telco so they'll try and build all the Skype-out/in stuff via partners. Who will then want an exclusive, charge for everything and won't be global. - Yahoo forget about partnering with BT and make Yahoo voice work properly. Except that YM! is pretty nasty and I don't think they can assemble enough programmming smarts. - AOL work closer and closer with Apple. The clever guys at Apple extend iChat into AIM and produce a PC version on the back of the move to Intel. In some ways this actually looks the most likely. I think the question for Skype is whether they can keep innovating fast enough to move further and further ahead into a really unassailable position where the only option for the commercial scenarios is to buy them out. This is a critical time in their growth where internal process and dealmaking will be pulling the limited programming resource into poor productivity. Rapid growth in company size and hence demands on time can be a real bitch to manage. |
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[ 23-Aug-05 7:36am ] [ Skype
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