A couple months back, I attended a dinner organized by Lee Dryburgh (founder of the popular eComm Emerging Communications Conference) and Thomas Howe. The event was a rousing success with many pillars of the VoIP community in attendance. Soon afterwards, the mailing list that had originally been used to organize the dinner venue became a forum for a discussion about whether the success of Skype has obviated the usefullness of the SIP protocol as an enabler of innovation.
Lee's argument in favor of the proposition had three parts. To paraphrase:
(1) Skype has done a better job as a multi-modal client (voice, video, IM and file transfer) than any applications built using the SIP protocol;
(2) the SIP protocol was never designed for, and is therefore ill-suited for, the next generation of communications applications in general (and social networking in particular), and;
(3) the emerging communications industry will stagnate if it continues to view SIP as an acceptable protocol for innovation.
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