I was very excited to learn today that I was honored to be part of The 50 Most Influential People in VoIP. The list starts with the Asterisk community followed by the FCC, Congress and Cisco. Further down the list are the bloggers. Starting at #26 with Jeff Pulver, Andy Abramson, Om Malik and yours truly at 29. Good news for Greg Galitzine who ranks at 35. TMC’s newest blogger Russell Shaw (news on what he is covering will break tomorrow) weighs in at 36. Tom Keating, TMC’s oldest blogger also made the list at 37.
The most interesting number on the list is 17 which reads: Bryan Martin, Packet8 – Went public before Vonage. May be around after them.
TMCnet was also honored under the heading The Anchormen – VoIP News Teams. The site was ranked #2 under this particular list – making it #43 — behind VoIP News and just ahead of Network World who rounded out the list at #44.
I think this is a good list but I am not sure how 3Com made it at all let alone #8. The last five years for this company have been a downward spiral in virtually everything they do. This company still has a great name and this is amazing considering how much their leadership and message has changed over the past half decade. Words like pathetic are what ex-employees use to describe senior company management. Still their early NBX work in the late nineties was almost a decade ahead of most of the competition. But if they are doing lot of VoIP research today they are certainly keeping it a great secret from many.
Here is what I wrote about the company in Internet Telephony Magazine in May 2001.
Can Someone Throw This Company A Map?
By the way, what exactly is 3Com doing with their company? Here was a runaway leader in the corporate networking market, one who happened to make the hottest handhelds in the business, to boot! With the inevitable convergence of more and more disparate products and the future of computing pointing to handheld devices, why would you give away your crown jewel and spin off Palm as a separate company? As I mentioned, the Palm platform provides a great deal of leverage. The question becomes even more important in light of the fact that 3Com discontinued their enterprise networking product line last year upsetting a tremendous amount of their installed base. 3Com is the only company I know that is discontinuing their product lines faster than it is launching new products. This company seems to have lost its way.
By the way I was berated by the PR department of the company for writing this. Less than a year later the PR people doing the berating left the company. Enough said.
One other comment is I think Alec, Jon, Skype Journal, Mark Evans, Garrett Smith, Greg Galitzine, Russell Shaw, Tom Keating and VoIPNow belong ahead of me on the list. I also think Voxilla would have been a good addition.
So thank you VoIP-News. You guys are awesome and I appreciate the recognition for not only myself but my fellow blogging community members who toil endlessly – many of us for the lure of getting rich quick via Google’s advertising network. 🙂
Brian Provost
November 13, 2006 at 9:18 pmHi Rich. Congratulations again. I wanted to clear up something that’s been a bit confusing. Everything after the “#1” influencer…the Asterisk Community…was categorized and not ranked. I should have made that more clear. There’s way too much talent and diversity to fairly rank people even within their own categories on this list.
Good luck with Google. I’ve done pretty well with it… 🙂
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