Yesterday, Skype released version 1.5beta for the Macintosh bringing Mac users long-awaited video support. Today, SightSpeed is scheduled to release version 5.0 which should bring us inbound and outbound PSTN calls as well as TV tuner support. While both of these offerings are great, they are both still missing some key features that would help bring them into mass adoption.
In the Technology Evangelist office, the statement that ‘Skype is the clear winner in VoIP’ has been heard more than once. I’m not sure I agree with that quite yet. Skype is a great consumer-to-consumer (C2C) application, but it falls down in business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) applications. When you make a call to a business today, you’re offered with a series of options to choose from: you may be put on hold, you may be transferred to a different person, you may be routed to a call hunt group for support and any message you leave could be e-mailed to the end user. None of these options are natively supported in Skype, SightSpeed, iChat, MSN Messenger, AIM or Yahoo Messenger. While a few of the players may have some plugins to get them partial support of one or two options listed above, none offer everything.
Why is this important? There will be a couple of key players in the VoIP arena – right now I see those as Skype and Vonage (when users talk about VoIP, they usually seem to mean either Skype or Vonage, therefore in my mind that makes them the key players). The problem is that businesses cannot adopt these services as their default communications method because they are too primitive. If I’m a Skype user, chances are I cannot Skype-to-Skype a user at Widgets-R-Us. I would have to Skype-Out to get to the company’s phone system. If a VoIP company wants to truly rule the entire market, they need to incorporate business class rules while still being consumer friendly. Until then, we will be left with the hybrid system we see in place now. Since businesses are not on Skype’s VoIP network, consumers will make calls to a business using Skype’s PSTN feature called SkypeOut which defeats part of the purpose of Skype in the first place. While the business may be on an enterprise VoIP system, such as Cisco Call Manager, the call is not native to one VoIP provider, it must jump around.
Imagine a VoIP service that offers everything a small to medium sized business (SMB) needs, as well as being so easy to use any consumer could grab on to it. Consumer use for voice, video and chat would be completely free. Business use, which gets them the ability to park calls, transfer, hold, etc., would be an up-sell, but would still be far cheaper than a traditional PBX system. This would create the perfect synergy for mass adoption. Consumers would use the product to talk to family and friends, as well as conduct business when needed. Businesses would use the product because consumers are on it. Businesses would use it to talk to other businesses since now other businesses are on this too. It’s a snowball effect that sounds easy on paper, but in reality is quite difficult to do. Getting users to accept the service, to reach critical mass, is the hardest part of this offering. Skype has this critical mass, but is missing key features needed for true mass adoption. I’m not even sure Skype is worried about this vision. Once Skype was purchased by eBay their worries of B2B/B2C went out the window. Skype is a pure C2C company now, and that opens the door for someone else to come in and take their place.
My wish list for the ultimate communications package is much longer than what is listed above. I would like to see help desk plug-ins for support, PBX integration as well as an open API that allows software and hardware vendors to directly integrate into their product. What other features would you like to see in your VoIP offering? Do you feel that Skype has already won the market or is it too early to tell? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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