Is Skype, IM+Voice or Voice+IM? IMHO, It's the best IM with great Voice functionality. But they're source of income is all on the Telephony side of the fence.

It doesn't really matter which way round it is. And yes, Skype phones are clearly on the Telephony side of the fence, but increasingly they make quite good portable chat clients as well. The only important bit from my position as a user is that Skype continue to innovate on the IM side as well as matching the other IM systems feature for feature. Because I use Skype for IM *far* more than the Voice part.

I think what's really happening now is that IM, VoIP are being dragged together as sectors with Skype already in the middle. The Voice/Video options in the other IM systems are pretty poor but they've been forced to add them. This leaves people like Gaim, Trillian, Adium out in the cold until they can work out how to do Voice interop with multiple closed systems. And it appears to be hard because even on the open specification side, only Gizmo have managed it and LibJingle hasn't come to anything. It makes Voice/Video interop important. Meanwhile the pure VoIP offerings are limited without IM+Presence. Which consigns them to corporate Telecom departments and telephony cost management. That's a huge market, but it's a very different market.

Perhaps this is just another skirmish in the old, old, battle between Bell Heads and Bit Heads.


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[ 13-Jul-07 11:57am ] [ , ]