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Image from Sharum's photostream
It seems that the consumer VOIP market is turning into a land-grab (or a subscriber grab). Three recent events really warm things up. The first was that Yahoo IM now includes VOIP, providing free IM to IM voice and voice mail and with their recent DialPad possibly a future premium (paid) service for calling land lines and cell phones. Basically that means that all the major Instant Messenger products (MSN, AIM and now Yahoo) support some form of voice service; though Yahoo's IM is different because it implements a standard protocol - SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) - this means adding additional future services (such as conference calling, video, etc.) should be easier in the future as should interoperability with existing phone network infrastructure.
The second event is that Google have also launched their Google talk beta - so Google are trying to get their share of the IM market *and* VOIP - quite how Google will attempt that (and how sucessful they'll be) remains to be seen. They are trying to enter two markets that already have some leadership - AIM in the IM market and Skype in the VOIP market. I'm not sure what will draw people to Google talk - maybe they'll leverage their GMail market share ?
The next piece of related news is that Microsoft have announced the acquisition of Teleo - this will give them the ability to take on Skype (from a feature perspective) - allowing PC -> land line or wireless handset VoIP - something that Google, and Yahoo don't offer today. To be fair though this was just a press release - Microsoft probably aren't releasing anything any time soon.
I should add, while writing this, I'm at home dialed into a 3 hour business review meeting using Skype.
Yes, the new announcements pose interesting questions but this all seems to be unfolding like a classical case. Everything was almost predictable a few years ago. In fact, I did a case study of mobility of WLAN in 2003. Skype does offer a "complete" solution to initiate the market: Crossing from the a VoIP network to reach PSTN-based end points and offering a virtual phone number that can be used by PSTN-based end points to reach a VoIP end-point are critical first steps for increasing the network of reachable end points, thus increasing the value of Skype network itself. As Hussain Eslambolchi, CTO of AT&T used to say, the value of a network is summarized in the number of reachable endpoints. These are things that should be obvious to Yahoo and Google. If they are not, perhaps they don't have the right staff running their VoIP product development.
Posted by M. Mortazavi on August 31, 2005 at 09:37 AM PDT #