Signal to Noise

The blogosphere, at least around my blogroll, has had an amazing bout of introspection over the last several days.  First, we had well-informed pal Alec Saunders declaring VoIP dead, in a manner of speaking.  Perhaps in reality, the death of VoIP is symbolic of a passage from the top-of-mind, as Ken Camp, a VoIP knowledge pioneer, pointed out by calling VoIP “plumbing”.  It’s not the exciting thing it used to be.

I mean, do you know anybody who gets hot and bothered about plumbing?

Jeff Pulver, whose own motions to transform his flagship VON expo and publishing operation into a “more than voice” effort seemed to indicate, two years ago, that VoIP has lost its sex appeal.

Is that death? Maybe not, but in this neck of the woods, something is dead when people quit talking about it.  Here in Cleveland, nobody was ever really talking about VoIP, except the partial players like Cisco VARs, and even they had to be careful not to call it “VoIP”.

Interestingly, there’s an obvious correlation between this death and Om Malik’s rant about the pigsty of mediocrity in which the U.S. business world now sits.  This is the best piece Om has EVER written, no question.  And it has almost nothing to do with VoIP technology. Instead, it deals with today’s craptacularly perfect storm of of crummy debt, bad business decisions, over-reaching government and under-achieving American companies.

The mediocrity and “it’s good enough” attitude has been at the heart of VoIP disappearing from the excitement radar.  Early pure-plays didn’t innovate useful services when the window of opportunity was open. Vonage didn’t offer an open soft phone, just as Skype never made a SIP proxy available to their users. Two huge mistakes.  But there’s more.

The cable companies insisted on bundling data, TV, and phone service, and then didn’t differentiate their phone service from that of the existing LECs.  So, not only couldn’t you get dedicated data service and choose your own voice provider, but you also got stuck with substandard phone service to boot.

Equipment makers insisted on asinine licensing structures (are you reading this, Cisco and Avaya?) for the privilege of using their “good enough” solutions, while scrappy, VoIP-only startups were sidelined by the general lack of decent broadband access.

It’s like all the elements of the telecom industry revolution were there–just at the wrong times. Broadband became pervasive, and just as it was getting unbundled (thanks Congress), the competing network operators went belly up, so ASPs and hosted voice providers, having sunk millions and millions into excellent new offerings, had no way to get their services to the masses.

Those that did survive did so because some insider bank gave them a loan to keep the engine running just a little longer, and then a little longer, and then a little longer. And when banker keeps pumping non-revenue dollars into out a cash-losing business, the banker eventually comes for his money. When the banker can’t collect, the treasury secretary buys his debt.  When the treasury secretary loses all his money, he prints more.

Then, suddenly, a gallon of milk costs $20.

That’s mediocrity from start to finish.