Tell me why some people don’t like Mondays. Today, I awoke to see the Internet pipes reverberating with thought-provoking posts from Voxeo’s Dan York and Skype Journal’s Phil Wolff. York’s post was triggered by an asynchronous exchange between eComm organizer Lee Dryburgh and telecommunications entrepreneur Shidan Gouran which appeared among the comments to an article that Wolff posted on Wednesday October 14 which, in effect, outed plans by former Cisco executive (now CEO of Joost) Mike Volpi to buy Skype and, essentially perform a sex-change operation by replacing its proprietary peer-to-peer architecture to SIP (the “session initiation protocol”), which is considered more “open” and therefore conducive to the sort of engineering (social and otherwise) that will result in support of social media and applications.

To use a tennis metaphor, the initial serve and volley between Dryburgh and Gouran turned into an exchange of groundstrokes that revealed that both players have impressive backhands. Meanwhile, York’s commentary, which takes a decidedly technical approach to whether it is practical for Skype to support so-called “P2P-SIP” connections, spurred another round of online discussion regarding the VoIP giant’s strategy for future survival and ultimately growth.

Yet, on Thursday Oct 15, Phil Wolff posted this article under the headline “Why Collaboration is strategic for Skype”. In it he practically renders the “P2P-SIP” question moot by declaring that “collaboration”, in its many forms, is the next must-have feature for Skype. It’s a compelling argument. Many of us have learned the hard way that users regard voice as a commodity. Skype built its much vaunted “reach” as a free, or very low-cost substitute for international phone calls. Only a small percentage of the hundreds of millions of users spring for services that carry a price tag, such as Skype Out to initiate calls to traditional phone numbers, or other call management features.

As Wolff correctly notes, “Skype everywhere” has been the goal of the company for a number of years. A number of developers in the Recombinant Telephony world are already building interesting apps with Skype talking to Asterisk and a skinnier Skype client supporting larger communities of talkers. In his post, Dan York notes that Skype constantly hires engineers with deep knowledge and experience with SIP. So P2P-to-SIP or P2P using SIP schema are pretty much a foregone conclusion.

Which leads us back to Wolff’s central belief that such a switch is simply not enough. The next generation of Skype must be transformational (and it is very much underway). It involves making it much, much easier for Skype users to collaborate in meaningful ways with one another. It brings in voice, video, screen sharing, conferencing, task distribution and other so-called “productivity enhancers”.

Skype could advance the best collaboration practices and technology. And with Skype’s distribution (one billion accounts by 2013), could easily become the tool of choice for producing results, enjoying your job, and building economic security.

That’s a pretty good headstart versus the firms whose beachhead is IM, UC or videoconferencing.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Recombinant Telephony, Skype, Collaboration, SIP