Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I’ve been a fan of Gary Will’s Waterloo Tech Digest for years.  During most of my time at Microsoft I’d look forward to the monthly update on Waterloo Region companies which he published.  Early in December, Gary quietly started a blog.  That rocks! 

Welcome, Gary!

During CES, Om Malik hammered out a fabulous rant on VoIP silos.  He talked about how the choices VoIP providers are making which tie specific pieces of hardware to their services only are limiting choices for consumers.  Pulver followed this up with a specific dissection of how Skype is limiting choice by not investing enough in their ecosystem.  And, while I chaired the VoIP and IM panel at CES, I heard repeatedly from Microsoft, and Yahoo that while they were "committed" to more open interop between networks and applications it would have to be done cautiously in order to be done "safely".  The spectre of SPIM/SPIT (spam on IM / ip telephony) was given as the reason.

There is a land grab underway, no doubt.  Otherwise I wouldn’t have to run Skype, Gizmo, MSN, Vling, Google Talk, AIM, and Yahoo Messenger just to talk with the people I regularly interact with.  What this reminds me of is the early days of the browser wars.  Netscape and Microsoft engaged in a battle of releasing conflicting HTML tags in order to make content sticky to one browser or the other.  It wasn’t until the W3C standardized HTML that progress really accelerated.  Let’s hope that VoIP / IM vendors get through this current phase of silo building quickly.  It’s not helpful to consumers or network operators.

Buried in another entertaining Rick Segal post about the new digital lifestyle is a link to FlyteComm.  This service knows where every flight on every airline (ok – it’s best in North America, apparently) is, and when it will land.  Could I have used this on my way to and from CES!

Bookmarked.

Following my panel at CES, Howard, Andy, and myself took Microsoft’s Anupam Gupta out to dinner.  We would have taken all the panelists out, but Jeff and Tom had other plans already.

Over dinner, I learned that Microsoft is clearly working hard toward a web 2.0 model with their Live branded products.  Anupam wouldn’t commit to a date, but we should be looking for richer APIs that allow third parties to interact with Microsoft properties, especially when the data being accessed includes presence and contacts.

We also had an interesting philosophical and semantic discussion around Voice 2.0.  Microsoft’s view is that the key assets in the new world include directory, presence and contacts which appears to be an enlargement of the original Voice 2.0 vision I articulated.  Anupam made the comment that, while MSN has 400 million members, they actually have 12 billion relationships enumerated in their contact systesm (buddy list and so on).  My view is that relationships, contacts,  and presence are applications built on the fundamental directory asset.

Anupam’s a sharp guy.  Dinner was a very enjoyable affair.

It’s been a while coming, but here are my thoughts on the CES panel on IM, mobility and VoIP which I chaired January 4th.  The panelists included Microsoft’s Anupam Gupta, Earthlink’s Thomas Hsieh, and Yahoo’s Jeff Bonforte.  I had a pre-prepared set of questions, some of which got used, but the audience was also very interactive.  All in all, I think it was a great session. 

Some of the more interesting observations:

1) Jeff Bonforte has a very large view of Yahoo’s business.  He’s articulate, funny, and has great vision.  I predict it won’t be long before we see his job title become Vice President. 

2) My first question asked how Skype had influenced each company’s plans.  Jeff talked about how Skype had demonstrated the need for great NAT traversal, and high quality voice.  He gave a great "mea culpe" — Yahoo needed to spend more time on that, and Skype encouraged them to do that.  Tom and Anupam said it hadn’t really influenced their plans, which I didn’t find credible.  It was a good public relations answer, but if it was really true, then why did MSN license GIPS last year?

3) We had a lot of talk around APIs.  My impression is that Microsoft has the clearest view on this topic.  Certainly Anupam sees the need for APIs for presence, directory, and so on, which don’t yet exist today.  If Microsoft can execute this well, it will ensure that Microsoft Live is a credible platform for the internet.

4) A hot topic, and hotly discussed, was interaction models between networks.  Tom was by far the most vocal proponent of an open strategy.  Earthlink would benefit greatly from a network model similar to that of the SMTP email model, where traffic from different, and potentially competing, services just moves across the network to the right destination.  Both Anupam and Jeff sounded cautionary notes, suggesting that until the model was more thoroughly thought through, "customer safety" dictated that they work on a federated model.  But, as Henry Sinnreich observed earlier in the day, the danger of federation models is that they simply become a an equally inefficient replacement for the current tariff and toll model that exists between incumbent providers. 

I really enjoyed chairing this panel.  Thank you, Pulver Media, for giving me the opportunity.  And thank you Andy for the kind words.  I hope to do this again.