John Linton .........Skype - whose founders yesterday turned the idea of free telephony into an $US8.5 billion sale in less than nine years:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703730804576314854222820260.html?mod=WSJ_Tech_INTL_LSMODULE
Personally, I have never used the Skype service but clearly close to 200 million people around the world do and they make over 200 billion voice and video calls in a year. Not bad for a couple of guys who dreamed up the Skype concepts in 2002 and made them work well enough for Microsoft pay such an amount for a company based on the antithesis of Microft's own financial operating guidelines. They have ten times the number of telephone voice customers than Telstra which, while not a large telco now, makes an interesting future for Microsoft that has over 90% of the world's computer users as its customers with the opportunity of adding a totally seamless Skype interface (and advertising) into every new edition of Windows or Windows 'service packs'. An amazing marketing resource that can't be duplicated by any other VoIP provider.
Apart from anything else it underlines how important VoIP already is in telephone technology right now and how even more important it is going to become in the future. We could not operate Exetel without VoIP and that has been the case for over four years. It isn't simply the cost of calls (though that would make operating a company in Sri Lanka very much more expensive) it is the ability of VoIP to allow us to integrate our provisioning and support process data base into our telephone system via Asterisk - we send over 1,500 messages to end users via email, SMS and voice each day via automated processes from our B2B systems with our suppliers directly to our customers. For other, much more sophisticated VoIP users than Exetel, VoIP has allowed them to deliver far more functionality to their processes and has cut operating costs far more significantly.
VoIP, and particularly Skype's implementation of it, demonstrates just how far VoIP has replaced 'conventional telephony', since 2002. Virtually from the very beginning of broadband internet, VoIP has been the key new technology that has delivered new processes and massive cost savings to every individual and commercial and government entity that has adopted it. VoIP has reduced telephone usage costs by 50% to 80% to any commercial company that has deployed it but has also allowed those entities to provide customer services that just can't be done using PSTN or ISDN telephony. Together with corporate VPN connectivity VoIP has transformed commercial and government operations. I, like the overwhelming majority of people who use VoIP (I only have VoIP at home and the office and MoIP on my mobile) it has been years since I noticed any difference to "standard telephony" - if anything the VoIP service has less line distortion than a PSTN/ISDN service when I have done a side by side comparison.
Apart from making Mr Zennstrom and Mr Friis mega wealthy beyond, presumably, their wildest dreams the Skype sale to Microsoft provides interesting speculation as to just how Microsoft will use this acquisition to recover their pretty ambitious outlay. While one company, even one as big as Microsoft, cannot 'change' world telephony practices overnight it will be interesting to see just what they will do now they own a cut price telephone company. It will be interesting to see whether this transaction begins to change the minds of the remaining dinosaurs in those commercial entities that have 'held out' in their refusal to consider VoIP services.
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