This book is focused on the key elements of telephony and the migration to VOIP – primarily as a cost saving measure. The first 2/3 of the book deal with the VOIP technology – as an adjunct to and eventual replacement for traditional (legacy) telephony. By the 2/3 point, the author is talking about cost analysis, benefits and justification.

I would more likely title this book “VOIP for management”. This is not a put-down or insult, as the book’s primary objective is to educate the mostly non-technical person on what VOIP is, and how it might best fit into an existing picture, and one moving forward.

Being primarily technical myself, this book was good as a preliminary introduction to a subject that I wasn’t familiar with – but I immediately moved on to the O’Reilly books on the subject – “Switching to VOIP” by Ted Wallingford and “Asterisk” (Leif Madsen, et al). Someone who is responsible for managing such a transition would find it much more useful than I did.

Also, Tech PRose was kind enough to add Signal Noise as a favorite telecom blog.

All that above together with the new features introduced with Skype 2.8 for Mac made me wonder: can Skype ever become the next big thing in the field of “social networking” rather than “only” the most popular VoIP service ever? Let’s try to analyze how far Skype is from this “big picture”.

Users are not certainly a problem for Skype. With over 200M users (not active, but downloads), it’s not far from the huge 150M active users of Facebook. What Facebook is missing at this time is a powerful desktop client. Despite the world of consumer services is moving to the “cloud”, having an always on client on your PC has many benefits, such as being always available and experiencing a realtime interaction with your friends.

I don’t know if a desktop client is the best place to do social activity management.  The browser is good for what’s it’s good for: rich browsing experiences.  But I don’t want to change the form factor of the IM client just to accomodate a feed list or yet another messaging utility.  Skype needs to stay in the same size and shape it has now: on the right side of my screen, occupying maybe 10% of my real estate.

Plus, the other thing that’s cool about Facebook is that nothing has to be immediate.  The realtime nature of Skype conversations is precisely why I’d sometimes rather communicate on Facebook, or e-mail, etc.  But please read Luca’s post, as it is a really cool idea that warrants deeper inspection.

This is the way the VoIP world ends
Not with a bang, but a whimper

Pulver pretty-much said this two years ago: VoIP is dead.  It became the “draw commodity” I hoped it wouldn’t, due to its promise and unique ability to transform the state of the telecom world.  But the politics of the device makers, carriers, and regulators proved to much, and VoIP became just another “more of the same” transport mechanism. It’s there if you need it–there if you need to draw on it, but not uniquely compelling.

Here are the ten things that prove VoIP is dead:

1. Vonage still hasn’t turned the corner. Further burying themselves in debt (what bank took THAT risk in this crummy credit market, seriously?), there’s just no way out for the pure-play provider.

2. Alec Saunders declared VoIP dead and he has some good reasons why.  (OK, Jeff Pulver, we’ll believe you next time.)

3. Everywhere you look, former VoIP honchos are turning to social media applications as a focus area–from Jeff Pulver to Ken Camp to myself. It’s a trend. Social media is where the opportunity for innovation in unified communications still exists.

4. End-to-end VoIP is never going to be a reality, at least not not under the current competitive structure for telephone companies.

5. VoIP is a tool of application delivery. It does not differentiate the service the way it used to.

6. VoIP companies offering really cool features should’ve made deals to make those features a part of pure-play companies’ service.  This would’ve compelled adoption and brought both types of companies closer to the black. Instead, we saw no joint ventures between pureplays like BroadVoice and “oh that’s neat” players like TalkPlus.   The result–VoIP pure plays were no different from the bundled phone service provided by cablecos and telcos, and the public couldn’t see what the big deal about VoIP was.

7. I stopped consulting on business VoIP some time this year.  In most of the United States, the demand for VoIP in the SMB sector is just not there (despite all the manufactured hype about it).

8. Hosted VoIP PBX as a business model died on the vine. It’s probably not going to get much bigger than it is today. This isn’t the hosted players’ faults–it’s the fault of our sorry North American telecom infrastructure.

9. VoIP today is an infrastructure networking skill, no longer demanding the high pay of years past. Get a Cisco certification in voice and you might have some sort of earning premium, but with the slow-down, I doubt it.  Bottom line is, like ethernet and TCP/IP, if you don’t understand unified communications and you claim to be a network engineer, you’re screwed.

10. Cisco’s vision of unified communications sucks and they’ve foisted it upon the business world, scaring many SMBs away from VoIP altogether and elbowing open technologies like SIP out of the large business space.

10. Darla Mack.  If you’re a Nokia nut, there’s no better destination.  The self-proclaimed “mobile diva”, Darla tries just about everything with her Nokia phones.

9. Rich Tehrani. The brawn and brains of TMC, Rich has been in the industry as long as any of us, and his blog is a great mix of gadget news and insider industry info.

8. Alec Saunders.  Alec’s in the trenches daily as a VoIP visionary (he declared VoIP dead this morning) and application developer, so he’s usually weeks or months ahead of trends.

7. Om Malik and his band of creative cohorts. It’s pretty hard to ignore the guy that breaks just about every telecom industry rumor 24 hours before it turns into news.  Some of his underling’s stories are habitually wacky (obsessed with all this overstated carbon economy BS, for example), but generally,
Om’s is one of the best blogs around.

6. Ken Camp and Sheryl Breuker.  I’ve been in the Ken Camp camp for years now. Now that Sheryl’s on board with Mr. Camp, they’ve begun leading the way in a movement I expect will become the norm in 2009: VoIP people concentrating on social applications instead of VoIP.  That’s my plan anyway, so I’ll be keeping tabs on Ken and Sheryl.

5. Esme Vos.  No longer the lone female in my list (thanks to Darla and Sheryl), Esme is primarily known as a event/expo organizer who concentrates on municipal WiFi, having founded the MuniWireless expos. But she’s got something to say about software, Apple, Nokia, publishing, and a bunch of other stuff I care about.

4. Andy Abramson. A keen observer and predicter, and a new media relations specialist by day, Andy has more contacts than any two other people.

3. Phone Boy.  Dameon “Phone Boy” Welch-Abernathy: the only guy I know with a name longer than my own.  His blogging habit is better than mine, too.   He mainly blogs about gadgets, Nokia stuff, and social networking.

2. Jeff Pulver. Like Camp, Breuker, and others, Pulver is leading the retreat from VoIP charge to social media through video and social web applications.  I love reading Jeff’s blog. He posts a ton of photos and track logs.

1. Martin Geddes.  He doesn’t post often, but it’s always worth the read.  Also, this guy pulls no punches. Just as I aspire never to do, Martin Geddes never sets off the the bullshit detector.

Another example — I was reading an online novel, a blog novel.  On the sidebar was an AdSense block, and my eyes gravitated towards the AdSense before I finished reading the first chapter.  The advertisement was for a woodburning fireplace. OK, I thought, there’s got to be a fireplace somewhere in this chapter.  Sure enough, I got the end of the chapter, and there was a brief scene with a fireplace.

It dawned on me that the author’s click-through rate on this chapter is probably quite low, since woodburning fireplaces may not appeal to his readers as much as, say, BOOKS.  And being that it was a fantasy novel, perhaps his click-throughs would’ve been better with ads for fantasy artwork, figurings, or some such.

Google would do well to improve AdSense by allowing webmasters to indicate which keywords correspond to the products or services they’d like to see advertised on their sites.

Phone Boy has a snappy post up today.  He’s appreciating Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 while simultaneously blasting the same-old-same-old intellectual currents of the blogosphere.  While I’ve never read 451, I do agree with Phone Boy that the amount of original thought coming out of the blogosphere has diminished considerably.  It seems that this has occurred mostly since more people started blogging regularly.  Professional blogs, amateur blogs, good blogs and shitty ones.  From Engadget all the way down to the proverbial full-time mom earning income at home for three bucks a post, the blogosphere, and the Web 2.0 world at large, is filled with increasingly irrelevant voices.

And why are they irrelevant?  Because they’re all saying the same stuff.

At its start, Web 2.0 was uniquely set apart from Web 1.0 because it neither sold the user anything (ie. Amazon 1.0) nor tried to replace an offline product (ie. NYTimes.com 1.0).  No, Web 2.0 was mostly about using the collective of individual user opinion to democratize good ideas, and perhaps even to monetize those good ideas.  Often, those good ideas were just blog posts with fresh philosophy or some tidbit of revelation about technology or science.  Sadly, Web 2.0 moved away from that whole idea, and it’s devolved into a sort of commentary on the technology industry where every author claims to be an industry insider.  I liken it to a guy who plays great poker quitting in order to write about other poker players because it’s easier to write about them than to play against them, ie. easier to write than to THINK.

If the blog aggregators have told us one thing, it’s that we, as self-proclaimed industry insiders, mostly think alike.   Is there a fear of public scrutiny that keeps us from blasting each other on our blogs?  Or is it simply bad form to have a public debate any more?  I don’t seem to have a problem with taking people to task publicly. Maybe that’s because I don’t have a problem being taken to task myself.  In fact, I do it so much that I’ve been called a grump, picky, hypersensitve, overly critical, you name it.

Don’t care.

I appreciate those who adequately express their own isolated opinions, rather than piling on the prevailing dogma of the blogosphere at any given moment, blowing the wind of whatever current Online Weather System is buzzing through.  Honest, concrete expression of unique ideas is what’s missing from these buzz machines.  A prevailing concept blows through the blogosphere and gets just beaten absolutely to death by the Agreement Monster.

Critical thinking goes out the window and you get a chorus of two hundred 22-year-old part-time bloggers saying Cloud Computing is to file servers what file servers were to mainframes, each unaware, at first, that his contemporaries are all reporting the same “news” as gospel. By the time you’re done reading Techmeme’s top post on any given day, you’ve probably consumed 15 posts that agree whole-heartedly, 5 posts that have a keyword match on a tag but are either unrelated or one paragraph in length, and 1 or 2 posts of dissenting opinion.

In questioning the easy-to-hold points of view, I often sacrifice traffic.   And that’s OK, because at least I’m telling the truth.  I don’t usually post about something unless I’m passionate about it, compelled to write about it, because frankly, there are better ways to spend my time–helping clients, helping my kids with their homework, etc.–than writing my umpteenth Thesis of Ultimate Agreement with Blogger X or Blogger Y.   OK, if I agree with you, you’re less likely to hear from me on my blog.

That’s OK, there are thousands of others who agree with you.  And you’ll hear from them.   Because they want the traffic from blogs.com and Techmeme.  But how many times do you really need to read the same opinion?

- When I say Asterisk is thought of as an API and not a solution, what I mean it’s a product-making kit, not a product. So there’s no Asterisk “S8300 media server” or some such. The point is, it’s up to the consultants to productize Asterisk in a meaningful way, and save for Switchvox and Fonality, that just hasn’t happened.

- Asterisk won’t sell into the Fortune 1000. It is a breakdown of logic to think Asterisk can be sold into the Fortune 1000 for lots of reasons, but the most prescient one is this: Fortune 1000 companies require national, if not international service footprints that are dense, quick, and connected to aggressive SLAs. Asterisk consultancies offer no such service. Hence Avaya and Cisco sell into the Fortune 1000 while Asterisk does not. This is the key problem with open source. It’s not open source’s fault. It’s just a fact.

Phoneboy chimes in with another piece of great news: apparently, Gizmo Project is also down. Sightspeed, here we come.

This guy thinks eBay’s stock dip was related to the Skype outage. Me, I think eBay’s stock dip was related to the massacre on Wall Street that’s been going on for the last several days.

Phil noted that, this afternoon, many users were able to log back on. Still no luck for yours truly. Good thing I don’t run Skype anymore, I suppose.

This is a very encouraging article (Thanks Andy for pointing it out!); almost too encouraging. I choose the word encouraging because fixed mobile and dual-mode devices are the “next big thing” for our whole industry, let alone enterprise VoIP. But the article paints a much prettier picture of dual-mode adoption than what I suspect is reality. Cases in point:

In a survey earlier this year, 23 percent of respondents say they use dual-mode phones now, and that will grow to 30 percent in 2009.

That 23 percent number is way high, especially as an indicator of adoption. First off, I doubt that 23 percent of enterprises own ANY dual-mode endpoint gear. But notice the writer doesn’t say “own”–he says “use”. Even fewer people are actually using dual-mode in any practical manner. Heck, I possess several dual-mode phones and almost never use them in the fashion in intended. Why not? Mainly because SIP endpoint support (still) isn’t on Cisco’s or Avaya’s priority list. Add to that my own anecdotal experiences (I don’t have a single client actually using dual-mode in a meaningful way today) and it all adds up to caca de toro.

In the same group, 45 percent say they use single-mode phones now and that will decrease to 34 percent in two years. As dual-mode phones become more available and affordable, businesses will prefer them to single mode, says Mattheus Machowinski, the Infonetics analyst who wrote the report.

Here’s where Infonetics’ math gets even weirder: only 45% of respondents actually use single-mode devices? If by single-mode they mean VoIP WiFI phones, then the number is way high. If by single-mode they mean cell phones, then the number is way low!  What enterprise isn’t using cell phones? And conversely, how many companies outside the Fortune 1000 are actually using VoIP WiFi? Sure ain’t 45% of them.

Then, if you add the numbers from the sample group up, it gets even more fun: 45% + 23% = only 68%.  Is this to say that only 68% of respondents use phones? What about the other 32%?  Sorry for being such an Andy Rooney on this, but the Techworld article is either a very poor interpretation of the research, or the research is way outside of reality. What do you think?

Pure-play VoIP providers will start taking cues from new players like GrandCentral and TalkPlus. So, instead of just getting dialtone and voicemail on your Vonage, hopefully by this time next year, you’ll have all the cool telephony features you get from somebody like TalkPlus.

And here’s the kicker:

In 2007, pure-players will either provide value or die out.

So, with the recent folding of pure-player Sunrocket on the negative side, and the acquisition of GrandCentral by Google on the positive side, it seems that my prediction was accurate. Value creators flourish while imitators get buried.