There has been fascinating soul searching on the web these last few days as the "failed experiment" called Skype is dissected by the whole world. Wall Street has belched up numbers, and concluded that EBay over-paid. Bloggers are busy micro-analyzing the various failures, and offering advice. Me, I'm in the Jeff Pulver camp. No matter how you look at it, Skype has been a remarkable achievement. 200 million users have downloaded the application, and use it somewhat regularly. "Skype Me" is common parlance for many individuals. Every telco in every jurisdiction worldwide has a Skype strategy, and for most of them it has involved dropping prices in order to compete. Consumers won handsomely.
No, Skype isn't a failure. By most definitions it's a roaring success. The failure was EBay's when they paid so handsomely for a business that was dedicated to sucking the profits out of a bloated telecom industry. Skype's business plan was to take less money from consumers than a telco would for the same services. What were they expecting? What Skype hasn't done is live up to its potential. The platform which many hoped would emerge from the momentum of Skype — the Voice 2.0 ideal of voice as an element in all applications — appears to have been sublimated to the needs of EBay's balance sheet. The potential for Skype to utterly dominate voice in this new world has not yet been realized.
There's still time. Nobody else has come close to what they've accomplished.
2007-10-03 6:38 am | 7 Comments »
Users of the social web now have a "Bill of Rights". Plaxo's Joseph Smarr has taken the core principles of their privacy policy, extended them to social networks, and recruited Marc Canter, Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble to support him in guaranteeing users of social networks three key principles:
Your Information is your own and you decide who will have access to it.
You maintain ownership rights to Your Information, even if there is a business transition or policy change.
You may add, delete, or modify Your Information at any time.
An interesting publicity stunt? Or is there something more.
I'm in the something more camp.
Smarr is taking the basic privacy principles guaranteed in law in Canada and the EU, and extending them to all kinds of data which users might reasonably think of as personal but which the law may not provide guarantees about. Your address book is your property, not the property of the company hosting it. And your address book is the DNA of your social network.
It's particularly relevant that the driver behind this effort is Plaxo. Dogged by privacy allegations from their early days, these folks have become model citizens in the world of online privacy, and deserve kudos for what they have done and continue to do.
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Tags: Bill of Rights|Plaxo|social networks
Microsoft's crown jewel, the Office Suite, has been under attack for some time. The latest spate of barbarians to arrive at the gates of Redmond have been web based — Google Office, Zimbra and the like. For the record, my opinion is that these guys are barking up the wrong tree. Despite the proliferation of broadband, connectivity isn't ubiquitous, and the achilles heal of web based solutions is intermittent connectivity. The holy grail for all these guys is a great offline experience and so far nobody has managed to pull it off. Even the highly publicized Google Gears sucked… just a bit less.
That might all change with Adobe AIR. AIR takes the tools that web developers use, and delivers them in a desktop wrapper… outside the browser, across operating systems. Adobe has released a great showcase of the usual suspects, like EBay and Salesforce, but what caught my attention was Communigate Pronto!, an integrated communications suite from Communigate. It looks and feels like a stripped down Outlook 2003.
Pronto integrates email, calendar, voice mail, news, contacts, and media in a single client application. It runs on the desktop, online and offline as well. It's in public beta now, and the team at Communigate have set up a server people to try it out. Warning: it's a beta application on a beta platform (Adobe AIR), and Pronto is still running on AIR beta 1, even though Adobe has just released beta 2. There are still some warts to work out. However, the potential is immediately obvious.
The battle between Adobe and Microsoft over desktop control is beginning. It's going to be won on the basis of applications like these, and not offline versions of EBay.
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Tags: Adobe AIR|Communigate|microsoft|Pronto
