By now, I’m sure you’ve heard that next year’s ETel show has been cancelled. I couldn’t describe the situation any better than the always smart David Beckemeyer:
O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference was by far the most fun of any VoIP conference for me. It was the place to find the most cutting edge telephony developments and always was attended by the most interesting audience and speakers. I really enjoyed working with Surj Patel and all the O’Reilly folks.
It’s sad to see this conference and related website winding down so soon, after just a couple of iterations. It will be a blow to the VoIP industry.
O’Reilly cutting back so sharply on their coverage of the VoIP space speaks to my recent assertion that VoIP is stagnant. An outfit as cutting edge as O’Reilly has decided VoIP isn’t newsworthy or interesting enough to their constituency. That is pretty telling.
As David might not know, the VON organization is taking serious steps to step into the gap, and whatever ball they happen to miss - we all know that Lee Dryburgh and the family-formally-known-as-etel (of which I am a willing and proud member) will catch it. For our part, we are extremely happy to stand between the serious telephony credibility of VON, and the Web savvy of the e-tel community, and we are going to do our best to bridge those worlds as they collide. We are running the innovator’s track at VON this week, and you can catch us there. Anywhere there’s a gathering of the sort of insane intelligence of the e-tel crew, you’ll find us begging to participate.
Which gets me to my shock. How could an organization as smart as O’Reilly get it so wrong? (As an aside, I am happy, happy, happy with the VON crew because they learned to stand their ground and defend their territory, and serve as an example of the benefits of long term focus). Apparently, they think voice isn’t sexy, and there’s not a lot of innovation there. David, Garrett Smith, and others have been discussing wether or not VoIP is stagnant - if it’s played - if it’s done.
As for me, I’m registering my vote, right here and now… stick a fork in it baby, VoIP’s done.
Which is the shocking part. I think that anyone who deeply thinks about this stuff knows that voice, in and of itself, is pretty stagnant and boring. But, if you only consider voice by itself, and voice services as only being about voice, then you’re really at a dead end. But, as Martin Geddes would say, if you see the transformation from horizontal voice into vertical services, where voice stops becoming the important part, and starts supporting the other applications around it… then you see we at the beginning of true, massive and ubiquitous voice enabled applications. I can’t believe that true Internet guys would miss this obvious architectural (in both business and bits) opportunity, but apparently… they have. To the VON boys, and the people that call Lee family, today you seem to be a bit smarter than O’Reilly - which is saying a lot.
One Comment
Hi Thomas. As usual, I probably didn’t really get my full point across with my posts on this. A lot of people have taken my characterization of “stagnant” as “dead” and it’s not the same at all. In many ways, I was really hinting at exactly what you say, in terms of “we are at the beginning”, only you say it much better than I did. This is exactly how I feel about it. The “VoIP industry” at large became boring and stagnant a while ago, as everybody simply copied Vonage or Skype or tried to come up with yet another way to shave a fraction of a penny off calls - and that’s all the press saw and all they talked about.
What’s far more exiting is the kinds of ways voice/voip can support other applications that Martin describes. We see this specifically in a sub-set of our PhoneGnome users. While the majority still see it as a way to make cheap calls (because that’s what we all have told them VoIP is about), there is a sub-set that figured out other, far more powerful, benefits in the ways it lets them integrate their web, email, phone(s), voicemails, texts, desktop, laptop and such. That’s when one gets really hooked and realizes the “phone companies” (you can include Vonage and Cable MSOs in that) are never going to given them that power.