Ok, so I may not have typed it out loud here but I am a huge fan of open standards. This applies double to any technology that involves communications.
If a market, any market, is to expand there must be a frictionless way for customers to gain value/enjoyment from the product. For communications products and services this includes the ability to communicate with the largest number of others with a minimum of fuss. Silos of technology do not succeed. Imagine if your Motorola cell phone could only call other Motorola phones; that your TV could only display signals sent by broadcasters using equipment from the same manufacturer; that your Toyota would only burn gas sold by Toyota; you get the picture.
There is an obvious counter-example to this statement; Microsoft. They have what amounts to a monopoly on the desktop. But even here, the ‘monoculture‘ that has developed brings with it it’s own warts.
VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is one of those disruptive technologies with tremendous potential. It is another tenticle of the convergance octopus that is dragging all the entertainment/communications devices in your home into your PC. I am a user, both personally and professionally. One of the great promises of VoIP is the ability to extend advanced communications capabilites to your PC,or any device with a network connection for that matter. But this potential can only be realized if one can actually communicate with others.
Remember way back, two paragraphs ago, when I asked you to imagine what it would be like if you could only call other Motorola cell phone owners? Well… that’s exactly the type of system that AOL (AIM Phoneline) and Skype have built.
Granted, both of them allow you to answer and make calls to the ‘old phone system’, but neither allow you directly contact users of the other’s service, or any standards based VoIP client. There are plenty of great examples of VoIP software that leverage the well established standards for VoIP (SIP, IAX, others); ranging from phones (hard and soft) all the way up to complete enterprise-sized phone systems (Asterisk). Using the legacy phone system as the only common-demoninator is rather like using a word-processor to compose a letter and then writing it out by hand.
Well, this post got a bit out of hand. I initially wanted only to point you to this review, but it turned into a rant on open standards. I appologize in perpetuity for my nonlinear thinking. 😉