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Michael Robertson Talks VoIP With Voxilla
Vick writes "Two 'Bad Boys' of internet audio, MP3.com's Michael Robertson and Kazaa's Niklas Zenstrom, are done taking on the recording industry. Now their big fight is with the telephone companies and, apparently, one another. In one corner is Zenstrom's Skype, a software-only VoIP product that uses its own protocol and is banking on the huge popularity of Kazaa for its success. In the other corner is Robertson's SIPPhone.com, trying to simplify VoIP, and using the standard SIP protocol, to try to bring internet telephony to the masses. In this Voxilla.com interview, Robertson talks about the future of VoIP and minces no words in explaining why Zenstrom and the Kazaa boys have got it all wrong." (Last month, we posted about Skype.)
The obvious attraction of VoIP is not enough on itself to make it succesful, rather it will need a big push in order to get going. All I have seen so far is that it has barely advanced beyond the simple voice chatting features of an IM client such as ICQ.
The interesting thing about SIP is that it is a generic protocol for starting and running conversations. It's not limited to one medium like say Jabber is limited to text IM only. You can use SIP for IM, VoIP, videoconferencing, file transfer, shared whiteboards, whatever you want. It's pretty cool. And it has loads of real-world vendors behind it. Forget about dodgy startups like Kazaa, I'm talking Nortel, Alcatel, Microsoft, et al. That's important because these are companies that ship real products (i.e. phone on your desk, the phone switch in the basement of your office, etc etc). They can simply roll SIP in and migrate customers very smoothly to it. The analogy to MP3 doesn't really hold, because the real strength of SIP from a consumer perspective is that it will be transparently embedded in everyday items - most users will never even hear about it.