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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."
Sony has millions of people playing their online games, just like Yahoo, you'd figure they'd see integration of VoIP into games at this point in the VoIP gold rush as a logical first step into the market.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The only company I have found that is interested in actually serving the customer so far is braodvoice. They will let me use Asterisk or my own equipment and let me retain control of my equipment. All the others I found refuse to. People ask me about Vonnage all the time because they advertise heavily. I always warn them away from vonnage because of the almost outright hostility I recieved from them when I was asking about using my own gear... I was accused of being a terrorist by one of their CSR's after explaining what Asterisk was and could do for me and my family and then was promptly hung up on.
If the company will not let you use your own equipment and retain control over it if you desire then I strongly suggest not using them or reccomending them to anyone.
I know that Yahoo will be the same way, Packet8 started with the same hoopla that yahoo is using right now and they also are hostile to educated users after promises of "being for the techie guy"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
How does copying someone else's VoIP fit in with Yahoo's business model? The way I see it, Yahoo is not in the business of person-to-person communication, it's in the business of making it easy to access knowledge of all sorts.
I can see how the IM client helps them, but software VoIP is different from IM - it's more computationally intensive, it depends heavily on the presence of broadband, and it's (in my opinion) a lot less versatile for those in a computer environment. You couldn't use this stuff in a cube environment. You can't be anonymous with voice. You can't enclose pictures or multitask easily.
For that reason it's really hard to distinguish yourself with VoIP - there's really only one thing a provider needs to do, which is get two people talking with reasonable voice quality. Once you're there, how does Yahoo! differ from anyone else?
Most importantly, how does getting people to use the Yahoo! client get people to do something that makes Yahoo! richer? Again - banner advertising won't work because people using the client aren't really looking at their computer screens.
It's hard to conceptually connect Yahoo! and any sort of VoIP client. I'm open to any suggestions of how it might work, though...