Back in the office after the christmas break - the holiday seems long ago now, sad how quick the relaxed manana feeling fades. Lenn came back and we nattered about some of the gurus he's met along the way - what a blast. I reckon if we made a list of the gurus we Skypers know it would reach into every important nook and cranny on the internet.
It's good to be back blogging - I'm a stop start blogger when time and passion allow. Kev (my other half) was inspired to return to blogging by my Charles Kennedy post. He reacted with his thoughts on Charles Kennedy.
It's been a hectic week at work with the launch of Skype 2.0 and announcement of lotsa new Skype certified goodies at CES in Las Vegas. The Register ran a summary yesterday which was a feed from the Electric News Network (ENN), based in Dublin and Edinburgh. In web pioneering days in Ireland, I knew the ENN founder and boss, Sheila, when she edited Dot.ie magazine, went on to set up TechTV and then ENN. We caught up a bit today and talked about life and children and the cold (in Edinburgh and Tallinn) and the state of the internet world. We must Skype soon.
As the momentum of free internet telephony builds with an inevitability that is as old as time, people try to stop tides with fingers in dykes - some conservative measures work but most are doomed to failure. I had a mail from my buddy Ian at Boggartblog following his comment on my Full Circle post. He is entirely unconvinced by Skype but doesn't mean it personally - he would say the same stuff if i was working for Google. He says:
The reason the web works is because it is not a telephone network, the reason the international telephone network works is because it is not the web.
Different jobs, different tools.
....
First rule of business, nobody ever made a profit by giving stuff away. Its not rocket science :-)
Ian bases his views on experience as an IT/telecoms consultant before he retired due to ill-health. What Ian overlooks is the inevitable drive of media convergence. He overlooks that Nortel Networks and Cisco have been developing voip products for years and that BT is committed to rolling out a voip network infrastructure within less than 10 years - i.e. PSTN byebye baby and one tool serves all.
Meantime, the telcos will spend zilch on expanding or maintaining PSTN services beyond min SLA requirements. And with new devices appearing on a daily basis to build the voip infrastructure - cordless voip phones, routers, routing management tools, crm software, call center plug-ins, streaming media, things we ain't even dreamed of yet - pstn is now recognised as a dinosaur by its owners. Broadband and voip are the revenue drivers of the future.
If Bell, Marconi and Tim Berners Lee had listened to the cynics I wouldn't be blogging and nor would Ian.
