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Yahoo Readies New VoIP Service
Rob writes "Yahoo is readying to capture a larger piece of the VoIP market and will announce a
new VoIP product during the next two weeks. The new service would be comparable to
Skype Technologies SA's, said Safa Rashtchy, senior research analyst at Wall Street
researcher Piper Jaffray Co, which makes a market in Yahoo stock. The impending move by
Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo into the VoIP
arena would potentially be disruptive."
once the larger urban areas (read 50% of America) are able to get broadband for $20-25/month, without having to pay for a mandatory phone line or cable tv along with that, THEN VOIP will be disruptive.
But as long as the vast majority cannot get cheap broadband BY ITSELF, VOIP will languish.
Here is a theory: besides wifi, the only thing that may push down rates and packages to that mentioned above is the upcoming digital Tv switchover. Broadcasting in dgital, each tv station will be able to broadcast 3 or perhaps 6 distinct channels. Thus in many urban areas, where you might have 4 to 6 channels that most people can get via rabbit ears, that might turn into 12 to 36 channels of content. Thus, broadcast tv could compete with cable tv. Thus, cable tv will lose a lot of subscribers. Thus, they will have to sell broadband cheapers. Thus the Telcos will have to sell broadband cheaper. All the telcos will be starting up their own dsl tv.
So it may be tv that pushes broadband down, not wifi.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
* Dialpad (http://www.dialpad.com/) was acquired by Yahoo! two months ago.
* Yahoo! has access numerous deals with top last-mile telecoms such as SBC in the US, BT in UK, Rogers in CA, etc.
My prediction: two months after Yahoo! starts to provide VOIP, Google will do so and then Slashdot will have an article annoucing that Google now offers VOIP and is the first one doing so and Yahoo! is copying Google.
they are letting someone else do all the early market analysis and R&D. they still get to see it though, after all they are a search engine company and have the ability to stay up on all aspects of business and technology, quite easily. They are *leveraging* the ability they have (tier one level to be fair) to collect and collate mass quantities of data. They can then pick and choose the good bits that look worthwhile, and reject the rest. So therefore they get a lot of expensive free and more stable stuff by staying one step below the bleeding edge. Le$$ risky, too.
Actually, being the second-mover in an immature market is often the best position to be in, as the first guys have already made all the mistakes that you don't have to make. And the "bulk of the customers" have not already set themselves up with the first choice. Most potential customers don't even know these immature markets exist; I wonder how many will know when Yahoo puts 360, flickr, VoIP, and all the rest on its home page, exposing their 250 million monthly unique users to the new services.
In a sense, it sure seems like Yahoo is becoming more and more like Microsoft these days, at least in "me too" department.
Skype has had great success with it's voip offering, and now Yahoo wants in.
Apple done great with online music, and Yahoo decides maybe it can too.
Google enhances their search technologies at various stages, and Yahoo follows the lead.
And on and on.
Competition is a good thing, but it would be nice to see Yahoo come up with something completely original instead of always following along someone else's coattails. I think Yahoo is putting a little too much faith on branding and nothing at all these days on technology leadership.
If they use SIP, they'll boost the whole VoIP industry, and perhaps emerge as a leader. If they roll their own incompatible protocol, like Skype did, they'll fragment the market and industry, perhaps controlling their own island, and pay the cost later when they've got some control. But that later gambit also creates demand for a SIP/Skype/Yahoo gateway. Exactly the kind of thing that OSS apps like Asterisk are better platforms for than in-house systems. Both because the OSS winds up in different hands, with different experience, each with their own priority in making their angle work - which then can all be synthesized by the project team. And because the in-house team will give shorter shrift to competing protocol features, especially as they rush to market.
For their sake, and for the sake of not wasting 2 years fragmenting and recombining the industry, I hope they've gone with SIP. But I'm not holding my breath.
--
make install -not war
Ain't. Gonna. Happen.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
When some people say VoIP they mean the equivalent of telephone to telephone communication (Vonage, Callvantage, Packet8 etc.) and some people mean messaging with voice (Skype, Yahoo, Messenger,iChat etc.). It's unfortunate that these two concepts have the same label. This thread is an example of the confusion that results from this glitch.
Haven't we already got free VoIP? The last thing we need is another protocol cold war. Didn't Yahoo! do enough damage with Yahoo IM?
The only way this could be a good thing is:
But of course it doesn't do that. All that will happen is that MSN will release a VoIP system, as will AIM, Apple will then piggy back on AOL service, and we'll all be left with 20 IM clients and 10 VoIP clients on our PCs wandering how we ever let it get this far out of control.
As an aside. Dear Mr. Jobs, If you are reading this, please, for the love of God/money whatever floats your boat: open up iChat. Its really, really good, but its not a killer app. No one will ever switch to a Mac for iChat. And I'll tell you why: only 3% of computers are Macs. See what happened with iTunes? That can happen again... just let windows users download iChat, for free, and watch iSights fly off shelf. Drop the price point to $50-75, let it work with USB 2, and you will have a winner. Why? Because like the iPod they are better designed, and do the job better than the competition. Logitec do not sell video calling, they sell cameras. MS/AOL sell software, but don't sell cameras. Which means that nobody is using cameras, because its too damn hard (for Joe Sixpack) to set the buggers up.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!