After I got fired from my job as a construction I.T. manager some years ago, I got a publishing contract with O’Reilly, who published two of my books.  This catapulted me into a position I’d never been before: that of a pundit.  Suddenly, my opinion mattered.  It was something I ran with, and for some time, did so profitably.  But it is indeed very difficult to stay ahead of the curve and remain a relavent pundit, especially when you have other concerns–like growing a quote-unquote real business.

That’s not to say I don’t keep up on the musings of thought leader like Andy Abramson, Alec Saunders, Rich Tehrani, Jeff Pulver, Ken Camp, Luca Filigheddu, Dameon Welch-Abernathy, and a slew of other thought leaders who are apparently much better at time management than am I.

Just get me away from my laptop screen, you know?   I mean I love sharing my opinion–that is, I really do like being a pundit–but can I please have a little me time at the end of the workday?  During the first half of the year, writing on subjects about which I care increasingly less (VoIP, for example) subsided because I just had to get something off my plate.

Jacob and Madelyn are in junior high school now, too. I do so much more with them than I used to.  They’re both great musicians and as they grow older, our mutual interests have widened.  We spend a lot more time together.  And Katie’s such an integral part of the family, too.  For better or worse, all of these things take time.

The same is true of Best Technology, which grew in 2009 to three full-time employees and now has clients from Sandusky to Hudson, a swath of northeast Ohio a hundred miles long and encompassing a fleet of over two thousand PCs.  This didn’t just happen.  It also took away from my enjoyable-but-time-consuming pastime of writing. I also joined the Rotary Club of Elyria in 2009, a service organization that has a very rigorous schedule and demands quite a bit.

At the end of the day, there’s very little time left for blogging, thought leadership, or punditry–whatever you’d like to call it. And I’m a little let down when I visit my own blog and don’t see anything fresh.

So–better time management–that’s my New Year’s Resolution. See you after the first.

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.