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Saturday, September 17, 2005

Read: Skype and think: the rising of a new MONOPOLY

"No one knows how exactly this story will play out. What is clear is that every major player will want to have communications capabilities as part of its toolkit. Users will get converged communications services from multiple providers: it will sound as awkward to talk about "your phone company" as it would to identify "your e-commerce company" or "your search engine company."


The problem I see is a huge dilemma:

Is it the right road to follow Skype (with or without ebay) like we followed Microsoft?
It has indeed the advantage to make us able to communicate with 50.000.000 users and more...

Or wouldn't it be better, after we saw where Monopolies bring the customers, to follow an open standard (like SIP or H323) platform and leaving this way the possibility to competition to play the role of driving the market?

VoIP IS the Future, like the PC was the future, but do we really want a new Microsoft?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Patrizia,

there is two types of monopolies:
1. the real (legal enforced) ones and
2. the de-facto (such as MS)

The second ones are nor real monopolies, because it is always you choice to use something else (there is the Mac and Linux). MS may have a de-facto monopoly on the desktop, but not in the server arena.

Skype is of the second type, you need not use it, you have other choices. Skype is currently very popular, because they did a lot of things right, but others may easily compete on the application layer. A monopoly would be if you could use only one Internet Access and only the applications provided by this access provider. BTW, if you do not like Skype, use Jajah ;-)

 
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