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VoIP And The Electric Toothbrush
This past weekend I went to the pharmacy because my youngest daughter Nicole needed diapers. Well that is sort of an excuse because I needed a slew of things as well. I didn’t make a list. I rarely do when going to the pharmacy. I prefer instead to meander aisle by aisle picking up all the items I have made a mental note to purchase.
At the end of one of the aisles, where pharmacy companies places the “impulse” items was a slew of really cool looking tooth brushes from Oral-B. The toothbrush type was the “Pulsar“ and it claimed to clean better than any battery operated or manual brush. There was no price on the toothbrush but there was a rack full of them leading me to believe they cost a few dollars or so. So I bought one.
I took it home and noticed as I started to brush that it was electric. I read on the package that a single Duracell battery in the brush and is not designed to be replaced. I flicked the switch and had perhaps one of the best brushing experiences ever.
I immediately thought of VoIP. Yes, you are probably thinking how could you think of VoIP when you brush your teeth? Well, as it turns out I wrote an article about an electric toothbrush and technology back in August of 1999. For whatever reason, I decided to go back to manual brushing a few years back.
In August of 1999 the world was a very different place. In my article was a reference to Nokia’s wireless PC cards that were the precursor to WiFi. In fact this same card was used by me at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo that same year as I did a live keynote demo of video over wireless LAN technology.
I held up a sub-notebook with the wireless card and told the audience that for the price of a wireless phone on a typical PBX – I had a wireless PBX extension with me on stage, you could have wireless videoconferencing using VoIP technology.
The point was that commoditization and standards are going to be the future of IP telephony and communications technology in general.
Getting back to the toothbrush… For about $5 you can get the experience of an electric toothbrush costing over $100. I didn’t do an official test but the Pulsar brush did as good a job as my electric toothbrush. Amazingly when you go to Oral-B’s website they list the toothbrush under manual, not electric. I had a tough time finding it. And I paid more than I thought I would but since it is an electric brush I feel like I got a good deal.
This whole experience reminded me of what is happening in telephony where the market is becoming commoditized. Just as technology is making tooth brushing less expensive with increases in quality, telephony too is getting cheaper by the day and customers are getting more features and options bundled into their service.
There is another trend to consider as well. Companies like Crest and Oral-B are getting into new markets by helping to commoditize the electric toothbrush market. This hybrid manual/electric brush is a category I never saw before. I recall Crest popularizing the inexpensive electric toothbrush a few years back and they too were able to use technology to get into new markets.
In the same way that Google can leverage search to get into e-mail and then IM and VoIP, companies like Crest are using the commoditized nature of tooth brushing coupled with a superior distribution channel to compete against entrenched toothbrush players.
What is the future of tooth brushing? Probably the same as VoIP. Companies will extend their dominant brands into the disposable electric market and consumers will get even more choices. They will also look for other revenue opportunities. While at the store, I picked up a large container of Crest’s New Pro Health Rinse. I like it a lot as well. It doesn’t have that alcohol taste you get with other products. Crest is extending and extending hoping to take more and more of your money through a variety of new products.
I see parallels to VoIP and communications in general. As VoIP is commoditized and new players come into the market, they must look to extend their brands further and look for new revenue opportunities.
But in the world of VoIP it is easy to extend brands and add new services. All you need to do is write the software as the internet is the distribution mechanism. When you look at the VoIP market from this perspective you realize how much of an advantage a company like Google and Yahoo! will have when trying to convert people to VoIP. If I can leave with a single closing thought it would be, If you are a small VoIP service provider, you better hurry up and differentiate yourself before the big guys start breathing down your necks with chronic halitosis.
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Comdial and PBX/CTI History
Today is a pretty historic day for me as one of the first companies I ever visited in the CTI space was a company called Comdial. Back in 1996 this was one of the leading PBX companies in terms of technology, general momentum and marketing. If you thought of advanced PBX companies, Comdial was at the top of your list. Inter-Tel was another company that came to mind at the time and there was quite a rivalry between the two organizations.
When I visited Comdial headquarters in 1996, I was impressed as it was the largest company headquarters I believe I have ever seen. Thanks to Greg McQuay a former Comdial employee for reminding me that the building was over a million square feet in size! When you took a tour of the facility you were blown away as you saw R&D, manufacturing and assembly all being done under one roof. The plant that Comdial had was so large in fact that they leased their plastic making machines normally used to make telephones to toy manufacturers whenever they were idle. You might argue the facility was too big but at the rate Comdial was growing at the time it seemed likely they needed all the space they had and more.
In 1997, Inter-Tel some may argue, started to win the race in technology through their launching of the Vocal’Net VoIP gateway and a VoIP network – one of the first in the world called Inter-Tel.net. Inter-Tel was one of a handful of companies that took part in a huge run-up in VoIP stock prices in what I deem the first VoIP bubble of 1997. Comdial no doubt noticed this and decided to jump into the VoIP game. They purchased a company called Array Telecom. Here is what I had to say about Array Telecom and Comdial back in 2000:
VoiceGenie
Years ago, when this magazine (Internet Telephony) was in its infancy, I met Stuart Berkowitz, the founder of Array Telecom. Array Telecom developed and sold Internet telephony gateways. What set them apart from the early gateway players was their unique minute-bartering system that allowed people in charge of individual gateways to barter minutes on their gateways for minutes on other gateways around the world. Berkowitz later sold his company to Comdial and has more recently set his sites on what he calls the "next big thing" in communications.
Berkowitz' newest project is VoiceGenie a company devoted to supplying building blocks to service providers looking to offer voice portals to their customers. Berkowitz feels that voice is the best interface going. He maintains that of all the inexpensive self service technologies such as WAP, IVR, and others, voice is the easiest to use and better yet, there are 2.2 billion phones out there versus only 400 million PCs. Voice portals offer the ability to talk with Web portals such as MyYahoo!, where you have preprogrammed your preferences such as sports teams, stocks to watch, and other information. According to Berkowitz, voice portals are the ultimate fat and sticky application in a world that considers fat and sticky apps to be the holy grail of the service provider market. In fact, he believes Webtone will soon replace traditional dial tone. He has a point: Voice dialing cell phones already have similar functionality and have proven truly useful.
I queried Comdial a few times about what they were doing with Array Telecom and I never really got an accurate answer. The company changed management at this time and I lost track of most of my contacts.
Comdial literally fell off the map starting around 2000. No marketing. Little PR and little of anything was coming out of their headquarters which eventually changed to
Comdial emerged from their slumber around 2003 or so for a few months. We heard from them at our Internet Telephony Expos and they seemed to once again have PR. There was a new management team in place and it seemed like they were up to some good things. Then they went dark once again.
It is for this reason I am not really surprised by the purchase of Comdial by Vertical. Bill Tauscher is certainly a visionary in telecom and he is doing a good job of aggregating the smaller PBX companies into a larger and larger company. As you may recall, Vertical Networks was purchased by Artisoft and the name of the company was then changed to Vertical.
I could go off on tangents for a while on my experiences in the market at this time as amazingly while Comdial was a leader in the CTI PBX market Artisoft back in 1996-1998 was an undisputed leader in the CTI appgen market or for those of you that weren’t there to appreciate it, the application generator market. Artisoft made tools that allowed you to build just about any telecom application you wanted. You could build a web callback button or a complicated IVR application with this software. Artisoft later decided to become a PBX company. They allied themselves with Alliance Systems (yet another article will likely be devoted to Jon Shapiro and Alliance Systems in the future) and did a bang up job of selling these industrial grade PBXs.
Getting back to Comdial. It is as if the CTI players have come full circle. The leading appgen company purchases the leading PBX company. It is sad what happened to Comdial. The people I knew in the late nineties who ran the company left right around the time Comdial went downhill. I think some of the reason for the company’s woes were that the new management didn’t understand how to take the reigns of this growing organization in a changing market. Whatever it was that sunk the company, it is one less brand in a fairly crowded PBX market. I wish Vertical much success with this acquisition and I am sure Comdial’s existing customers are now in very good hands.
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