Seemingly in response to the questioning of VoIP bloggers aimed at Rebtel and Jajah, which explore and yes question their long-term strategies and consumer appeal, Jeff Pulver posted the following:
After spending the past week reading various perspectives on some of the recently funded (mostly) mobile focused VoIP startups, I find it amazing how some members of the Blogosphere feel as if they have an inside track to the future success of one or more of these startups. As if what they have to say about a company actually meant something more than just words. Now while I am sure the marketing and PR folks at these startups are now more than ever concerned about getting to the “right side” of whom they believe are the opinion leaders in certain parts of the Blogosphere, at the end of the day it is up to the customers of the company to determine whether or not the product or service is a success and not a blogger.
If members of the Blogosphere are interested in having their opinion mean something significant, may I suggest they apply for a job at their local VC firm and see what happens? Or even better, if they discover a better way at solving a problem than currently exists, why not start a company that solves that problem and then go out and raise some money themselves? Turns out that criticizing a vision is easy if you don’t have one to share yourself and but even more challenging if you do.
When I read it, my first reaction was, somebody hacked Jeff’s blogger account. Now, I wouldn’t go toe to toe with Jeff on matters of funding and the telecomm business. I respect and admire Pulver and his thought leadership, which is usually way out front, well-reasoned, and calmly expressed. So this post reveals that the hoopla has clearly pressed some buttons in the blogosphere and with Jeff.
I’m not a VC advisor, nor am I a venture investor. No inside track here. Nor am I in posession of Rebtel’s or Jajah’s considerable expertise when it comes to what they do. But I can, as a business owner and observer of the telecomm industry, state how I feel based on what I’ve observed, and I think this one of the great things about Web 2.0. Sure, with everybody spouting off (and many completely unequipped to address the matters they spout off about) there’s a lot of noise in the “new web”, and the blogosphere does have shades of tabloid zeal and lots of people looking for an idea to pounce on and trash. Believe me, I know this. The second you go on record with an idea that a number of folks disagree with or question, you hear it and you hear it fast. A few weeks ago I mistakenly ripped Verisign for a problem that was clearly NetSol’s fault, and I got ripped bigtime. My comment log fills up whenever I make a faux pa.
When people ask “where’s the beef” with Jajah and Rebtel, they’re not challenging them because they wish to see them fail. They’re challenging them because they want to see them succeed. So my comments were coming from the vain of “how ya gonna make money with this”, not “yer idea sux and it will never work”. I’ll gamble that Ken Camp is also coming from the practicality camp. He and I want to see all these startups survive the long haul and become century-old blue chips, not go down as a blip on the 2.0 radar after only a few years. When I look at anybody’s business idea, I put myself in their shoes, based on what I know about their business, and I say, “Now how are we going to make money?” And, suffice it to say, Rebtel and Jajah are an enigma to me as a business owner. That doesn’t mean I want them to fail. And it doesn’t mean I want customers to pass them up. It just means I want them to be around in another ten years or fifteen years, because I recognize the depth of their expertise and skill with the core technologies in question. I don’t want them to become the next Excite, never able to make real money, or the next Amiga, never able to capitalize on a revolutionary idea, or even the next Enron, without a long-term business model that isn’t an unecessarily complex shell game. How sustainable is their model? Does the shadow of the big carriers make these guys takeover targets or dead meat? Being “on the outside”, I just don’t know, but I know it’s hard to imagine them doing what they do now in another decade. The same goes for Skype, SipPhone, Fonav and a dozen others. I’ll even wager differently on the success for a few of them–based on what I know as an admittedly outside observer.
Does the fact that I’m a mere blogger on the outside looking in somehow invalidate my opinion, or Ken Camp’s? I don’t think so. It might make us less informed, of course. Blogger James Robertson fires back in a much more pointed fashion:
The subject of that *cough* argument *cough* doesn’t even matter. It gets regularly trotted out across the board, in the tech industry and in politics – the gist being: “If you haven’t done X, then you don’t understand X, and are not allowed to have an opinion on it”.
Excuse me? That’s a theory designed to limit debate and give control to some nebulous set of technocrats who “really understand things”. Thanks, but I’ll take robust debate over that any day of the week.
And the comment posted on James’ entry takes the cake:
I’ve never waltzed in the fast lane of the motorway, but do you know what, I have an opinion on how good an idea it is.
That’s probably on oversimplified reaction to Jeff’s post, but it’s spot on. The sharing of opinions, while not always pretty and often under-informed, is at the heart of Web 2.0, isn’t it?
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