No more Innovation in VOIP ?

The other day, I was reading on a blog about how the VoIP innovation has died with Skype. This triggered a chain of thoughts in my mind. While I respect the counter views, I have a different opinion on the whole VoIP innovation. Firstly, this post is not about the management shakeout at Skype, nor is it about any other company in particular. It is about innovation in VoIP and how did Skype contributed (or did not contribute) towards it.

When Skype started out in 2003, traditional phone companies were ruling the roost. Skype was almost the initial few companies to bring VoIP to the masses and made a huge name for itself in the process. Over the next few years, Skype almost became synonymous with cheap calls (read VoIP). It was almost the telecom provider of the internet era. I am sure all of you reading this post would have used Skype at some point in your life. It had developed a huge and more importantly a loyal and evangelistic customer base. I remember how passionately people would write/discus about Skype, how to improve it, how to hack it, etc. In fact it was passionate followers like these which made Skype what it is. Skype really made a huge contribution to VoIP. Please note that I am using past tense in the above paragraph, since the growth trajectory has slowed and the company is definitely not on its initial path to glory.

Having praised Skype for all the good work, I would still not rate Skype as the most innovative company. Though it had the initial critical mass and the support, Skype is, unfortunately, not the one which has really helped in the VoIP innovation. In fact, most major innovations in VoIP have come from companies other than Skype. The first call over Wi-Fi was demonstrated by Truphone. Skype was not even the first company to introduce VoIP, we already had other companies. In fact a company called Vocaltec had probably first introduced their internet phone way back in 1996. Skype still does not support SIP or integration with other IMs. Look at web-callback, SIP, VoIP aggregation, VoIP on mobile, free calls (isn't that why you visit this site to regularly?), etc. All these have been brought to you by companies beyond Skype. Probably what Skype did well was to package the existing technology and make it easily available to the people.

This brings me to my next point. What is the real major innovation that we really want in VoIP? Let me put it this way, what would help VoIP move to the next level? Though I have some views on it (and would reserve them for the next post), but would like to hear from you. What are some features that you would like to see in a VoIP application and you think that could accelerate VoIP adoption.

This article is written by our VoIP news editor Alok R. Saboo. Alok is pursuing his PhD in Marketing at the Pennsylvania State University.