Skype Communism

June 10, 2005

I was checking out the VoIP forum and came across a post that mentioned that Skype is like communism because people share their computer resources and a few people make money. I guess the author was serious. I wonder if it was a LEC that posted this ;-). The company cannot be more capitalistic in my opinion. In fact the Skype model is soon going to be duplicated by many companies looking to get into the enterprise space. For example if you are selling hosted PBX products, you give away a few users worth of service to get them hooked and then charge either for more users or more features. Marketing costs go down, more people try your service and you have a higher likely hood of success.

TelTel and FWD are a few other companies that duplicate the Skype model. These two services use SIP though. I met with the folks from TelTel btw at TMC’s SuperComm party. The management cam from a company called Blue Silicon… A company focused on connecting disparate voicemail systems. They were a casualty of the bubble bursting. The team of people at TelTel are top notch in my opinion and they recently told me about their certification program allowing lots of different devices to work on their network. They also told me that they have software that will communicate with a WiFi phone and get it to work without the need for a user to have to configure security settings. Pretty cool. I am looking forward to testing their service soon.

Skype Communism

Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com

Skype Communism