Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Over the weekend, I installed the latest Windows Vista build.  While not substantially different from the previous one I installed, it was exciting to see that it’s a little faster, and a little more stable. In other words, what we’ve got now is likely feature complete, and the folks in Redmond have started to turn their attention to the last phase of shipping a new OS, which is performance and stability. 

The installer, as reported here, has changed dramatically for Windows Vista.  Instead of installing individual components, as previous versions of Windows have, this installer simply copies a ready to run image of Vista to your hard disk, and then customizes it.  The impact, for IT departments and OEMs, is that they can now have one image that can be flashed onto any hard disk.  A dramatic savings!

For lowly end users, like myself, however, it sucks.  In order to install the Vista upgrade I had to free 11 G of space on my “busting at the seams” hard disk.  I dumped all the media files and photos onto another hard disk on my home network.  Once copied onto the disk, the install process dragged on and on as the system configured itself.  It took well over an hour to install. I went and worked at another PC.

The Tello team today announced that they have secured $10 million in series B funding, led by Canadian VC BCE Capital.  Previous investors Evercore, Rho, Eagle River, and Intel also participated in the round.

I spoke with Tello CEO Doug Renert a couple of weeks ago.  He explained their vision as providing unified communications services for small and medium businesses. Just prior to our conversation, Microsoft unveiled it’s unified communications strategy, and shortly after,  the Microsoft / Nortel pact was announced.  Tello is smart to focus on the small business segment, outside of the focus of these two giants.

If you’re interested in trying Tello, the company has a beta up and running which runs on PCs and Blackberry handhelds.  They also have a trial program for Asterisk PBX users, which enables shared presence information between Tello subscribers, and routing between Asterisk PBX’s directly, without traversing the PSTN — ENUM on steroids.

Unusually, neither of these announcements — the funding, nor the Asterisk program — have attracted attention.  I don’t understand why.

Telephia published the results of a VoIP telephone service survey yesterday.  The survey polled a sample of the 2.9 million US “pureplay” VoIP telephony households.  They did not measure PC based usage, like Skype, nor cable usage, but focused solely on service providers like Vonage, AT&T and Sunrocket.  While excluding Skype and other PC based systems is defensible, it’s hard to understand why they took cable out of the mix. 

In any case, Vonage is the dominant player by a long shot in this segment.  With 53.9% share compared to second place Verizon at 5.5%, Vonage is the player to beat.  More interesting, perhaps, was their measurement of the reasons people switch services.  12% are expected to switch to another service provider in a given year, which suggests that churn in the VoIP service provider industry is much lower than the cellular industry, or the internet industry.  Most often, the reasons cited are voice quality (27.4%), customer service (14.7%), and price (13.4%).  Interestingly, Vonage’s churn (at 2.11% per month) is more than twice the Telephia figure, which suggests that if, in fact, Vonage customers are churning away to another VoIP provider, then the industry as a whole is benefiting more from Vonage’s marketing than Vonage is. 

BusinessWeek Online does a masterful job explaining why telco’s hate innovation.  Worth a read.

In Paying By The Stroll, Frankston takes a good natured swipe at the whole net neutrality debate.  In a planned community of the future, he takes a stroll on a vendor owned sidewalk. Bob’s position, of course, is that the network ought to be a public service.  Certainly that’s a model that has worked well in some other places.