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Intel and Skype Exclude AMD
Raenex writes "CNET is reporting that Intel and Skype have signed an exclusive deal that would cap the number of conference call members on all but Intel architecture. Skype will only offer 10-way conference calls on specific Intel chips while other chips, including all AMD chips, will only offer 5-way conference calls. From the article: 'Though few would argue that a niche feature like that is going to be a deal breaker for most PC buyers, the importance of the Skype-Intel alliance goes well beyond VoIP conferencing. Indeed, it's the latest, and certainly most prominent, example of Intel's new take on marketing: Lock in software partners as well as the PC makers.'"
To allow more conference calls to users who are using a specific CPU is a cheap shot at the market. It's not fair to chip makers, and definetly not fair to the consumers.
Gatta start watchin Intel's sucker punches.
google.slashdot
I'm sure everyone on Slashdot will now be screaming bloody murder but this sort of a deal is completely legal and allowed. Intel and Skype don't have to play nice with anyone else's stuff. I'm sure I'll be modded as flamebait but I challenge all of Slashdot to prove, using US Law, to prove that this is illegal without any doubt.
Cisco has a good start on them though - but not the software, that's Skype.
This is going to be an interesting field to watch for the next five years.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Haha, like that is gonna make people want to stop their migration to AMD. Although this is a scary precident, it will most likely backfire. AMD will be able to further fan the fire with this.
Although I cringed when I read the article summary, this does underline how AMD has pushed Intel into a corner and I for one will feel a lot less sorry for Intel when they get crushed by AMD. ;-)
No, I wouldn't avoid buying a PC with an AMD chip. I pretty much buy all AMD now, and I plan to continue. I would, however, be sure to not use software that tries to dictate to me what type of hardware I use. I wonder if this will backfire on Skype?
It only opens the door for Skype's competitors to gain a foothold by not instituting such a silly restriction.
It also turns into bad PR for Skype for the tech community to find out that Skype intentionally hobbles their software.
eBay owns Skype. eBay knows product marketing. Skype is not run by a 19-yr old kid with a manipulative uncle pulling the strings. The minute eBay sees they can capture more market share by "goign open", they will.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Whatever the merits of AMD's existing anti-trust complaints, there is no freaking way this isn't an anti-trust violation.
Yes, there is one way. I had the exact same thought as you did, right up until I realized something: Intel no longer has a monopoly in the processor market.
The conclusion that then follows is: There is no more anti-trust. Just competition.
Scary.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
... This is what you get for using a closed, proprietory technology. Use SIP (or H.323) and you're not going to get any of this "10 user max" limit crap.
But other companies do this and get away with it.
For example, Itunes requires your portable mp3 player to be Apple Ipod.
I dont see the big deal. It's a similar concept, tie-in value selling.
I don't see calls for Apple to stop preventing people from making Fairplay compatible mp3 players. Or at least licensing out or opening Fairplay reasonably.
AMD has better and cheaper desktop chips and they keep gaining market share keeps on rising. If a user has an AMD chip and Skype will only support a 5 way conference call on AMD then I'd imagine the user would probably look to another VOIP solution instead of lookinf for a new PC with an Intel chip. It's a stupid move for Skype.
Ok, if we are going to have anti-trust laws on the books, now would be a perfect time to use them. If this isn't anti-competitive behaviour then let he who holds that position define what is.
This is on a par with Ford and Exxon agreeing that unless you are burning Exxon gas your Ford's engine will be capped at half it's rated horsepower.
Democrat delenda est
A lot of people are commenting that this is harmful to skype, but I'm not so certain. After all, Joe Sixpack will only know that he can conference call with all of his buddies with a intel machine, while AMD "can't handle it". The whole concept of software limitation is totally incomprehensible for the majority of the non-slashdot crowd.
AMD better start a massive PR campaign RIGHT NOW to make this backfire on Intel and Skype.
Slashdot: news from nerds.
With all due respect Asterisk is not an end-luser solution. Administering it and configuring it requires some mental effort. This limits it to a fraction of the Internet population.
Skype is a an end-luser-only solution. This makes it the solution of choice for the rest of the Internet end-luser population until a better alternative comes along.
As far as the "limit conferencing to 5" this is quite an interesting twist. Conferencing is clearly a business feature. Very few consumers are interested in it. At the same time the main complaint of AMD against Intel is about practices that deliberately lock out AMD from corporate markets (not the consumer ones). So by doing a restriction on a business related service Intel is not just shooting itself in the foot. It is doing it with a bazooka while looking at the exhaust funnel.
Skype is also shooting themselves in the foot. If they claim that this is for technical reasons (which sooner or later they will) AMD can take them to court and force them to enforce this limit on all AMD driven hypernodes. While the argument is clearly far fetched, there is still a fair chance that a good AMD lawyer may manage to get Skype smacked with a "limit to 5 for anything on AMD " injunction. Now this will be seriously entertaining. Most hypernodes are consumers and students. This is AMD land. Not Intel who is usually sitting behind the firewall. So, I like the smell of collapsed P2P networks in the morning. It smells like victory.
It will be also a good idea for AMD to buy a few congresscritters to force mandatory legal interception provisions on Skype.
I see great entertainment ahead. This is worth watching and following. Time to chose a front row seat.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
And as with any "new boom" there will be a "new crash" just as hard. More typical Wired Magazine pitching to the executive crap, IMO.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I think that is exactly why he differentiated between Asterisk and Free World Dialup as one being for the end-user and one not.
You got it backwards. Intel is not leveraging a (no longer existing) monopoly in the processor market to help Skype gain a monopoly in the VOIP market. Rather, it's the other way round: they are leveraging Skype's near monopoly in VOIP to bolster Intel's dying processor monopoly.
So the real question should be: are there today any credible competitors to Skype?
The moment Skype decided to make their software behave differently based on arbitrary metrics, like CPU vendor, the "just works" went out down the toilet. Now it will sometimes work for some people and for others not. The solution? Get different software.
Skype just took their first step toward being irrelevant in the market.
And don't tell me Linux isn't preinstalled because nobody wants it.
Nobody wants it.
At least, nobody wants it enough to pay a premium for it. Because a Linux pre-install is a *separate* product from the Windows pre-install, it doesn't get made for free. It actually costs the manufacturer to provide Linux pre-isntalls. If the demand for Linux pre-installs is high enough then the cost is worth it. But if not, it's a loss, and so the manufacturer stops providing that product line.
Linux users, as a whole, are perfectly capable of installing Linux on their own. Even if you did pre-install Linux, odds are the Linux user is going to slap on another distribution anyway. You might as well be marketing OS-less systems rather than Linux systems.
In short, the absence of Linux pre-installs on desktop machines from the large OEMs is not evidence of a dastardly conspiracy.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Only on Intel-compatibles. It used to work on a competing processor, the DEC Alpha (WinNT, anyway), but Compaq (then the #1 Windows reseller) killed the Alpha when it bought DEC - just as MS killed its Alpha version of Windows.
Of course the "lockin" isn't that simple. Intel doesn't lock out other OS'es, like Linux, from Intel CPUs, nor does it lock Windows or any other OS into using only Intel. Even the Skype/Intel preference isn't simple - other CPUs will still work, but not as well, by contract. But HW/SW lockin is far from new, as the creaky old term "Wintel" itself indicates.
Of course, that's not the point of the Intel PR that CNet is reprinting without critical reflection ("reporting").
--
make install -not war
It's the sign of a company that is falling behind in their core markets.
lol... "Is freely giving away our service a sustainable business model?" Where (or better stated, when) have we heard that before?
Nah, Skype isn't even on our radar. At least not with my company since we focus exclusively on VoIP for small businesses. And we love Vonage and the handful of other major players because they are leading the charge against regulation and fighting the legal battles with telcos. Plus their marketing saturation lends creditiblity to the concept of Internet telephony.
And to the GP, I wasn't claiming that Skype will fail for the same reason as Napster. I simply said that they will have the same historical significance. Also see: CP/M, Altair 8800, Lycos, and the thousands of other technological pioneers who were later runover by more nimble players in the market. They all failed for different reasons.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
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Consider how this may have happened:
An Intel marketing person thought this was a good idea. He is one of those who knows nothing about technical things; he's just a marketing drone. What could he possibly do to advance the strength of his company? Nothing. So, to pretend that he was contributing he turned to evil. He made a deal that looks good to other know-nothings like himself, and is really, really offensive to the people who matter.
This is a violation of the anti-trust laws, I think.
New Intel mottos:
Intel: When you can't compete, be adversarial.
Intel: We're on the way down.
Intel: A technical company controlled by people with no technical knowledge.
Intel's present adversarial behavior is part of a gradual decay of the company that is more than 10 years old, in my experience. Perhaps 10 years ago, Intel arranged a pay cut for employees just before they began to do record business. During that time, Intel has done some really, really disgusting things, like trash their consumer products division by not paying enough attention to it.
And why not do this?
Because no one wants them. Some manufacturers have done this in the past, but it turned out that there weren't enough buyers to make it worthwhile. This is because a pre-install is a good in its own right, and sufficiently valuable that consumers are willing to pay for it.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
...if the market were truely free to decide the point.
But the market IS FREE to decide the point. Just because they aren't deciding it the way you want it decided is beside the point. Volume discounts are legal, ethical and moral, regardless of the size of the company. A restriction on volume discounts requires government intervention into the marketplace, which makes the market unfree. These interventions typically take the form of arbitrary anti-trust decisions.
You CAN have a free market with anti-trust in your legal framework. But you cannot have one when the anti-trust is arbitrary, as it is in the US legal system. The error in the US system is to treat competitive actions as anti-competitive.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
No, If you read the review again you will see that the AMD in green color wins more benchmarks than the Intel Yonah. How come all Intel fanboys are liars?
If nobody wants it, then why does Microsoft do the OEM
"keep others out" deal anymore?
10 years and people still don't get it...
1) Bulk/Bundle licensing has been around for a long freaking time, pre-Windows even.
2) It is the OEM's decision to buy the bulk licensing to include Windows, NOT Microsoft. Blame Dell, or whoever is making the computer, not the OS Vendor.
I was the head of a very successful company in the late 90s that competed against the Dells, Gateways, etc. WE CHOSE NOT TO DO THE BULK BUNDLING DEAL WITH MICROSOFT. It cost as 3-5 dollars a copy more for OEM Windows (That is it), and Microsoft gave us all the benefits that Dell and any other company got. The only difference is we could choose to sell a BSD or Linux based computer, the trade off, we paid about $3 more for each OEM copy of Windows.
So when you talk about Microsoft keeping the 'market' from moving to Linux or BSD or anything else, you need to yell at Gateway and Dell and others for CONTINUING the myth that is a Microsoft thing, when it is their OWN thing and their OWN greed to save the $4 bucks instead of offer more choices for their users.
Everyone is mad at Microsoft for the Windows Bundling, but EVERY freaking company does it, and has offered it. Microsoft DOES NOT require ANY company to do it, nor do they get ANYTHING but a better price.
And yet companies like Google are signing the same deals with Dell, and other companies in the past have as well, so that you can't order a freaking Dell without the Google desktop, or think back over the past 10 years and all the CRAP software that was bundled with your computer as 'feature'.
Heck even Corel's Wordperfect tried to get my company to exclusive bundle their prducts by offering a better a price.
Why do you think you see so many Wordperfect bundles on systems (especially over the past 8 years), do you think it is because the computer makers are trying to get back at Microsoft? They could give a crap, plain and simple, Wordperfect is cheap, and exclusive bundles are even cheaper.
Yet everyone thinks Microsoft is the only one doing this, or is doing it in a way that no one else is doing it.
So go yell at Dell, HP, Gateway, NEC, Toshiba, etc. They are ones that have limited your OS choices, not Microsoft...
They turned evil when they were bought by eBay. Before, I was quite confident their encryption was sound, now after they sold their souls and released skype 2 I have to assume NSA can tap in.
If you uninstall Skype from a Windows machine, it directs you to a survey page that asks you why you are uninstalling and invites you to provide comments. 1 of my machines is Windows, so I filled out the survey and explained that I was uninstalling it because of their policy to only enable certain features on Intel processors. Under Gentoo it's as simple as emerge -C skype, they don't ever even find out about that. Anyone using Windows should immediately uninstall the program and fill out the survey. Maybe if they lose 10,000 customers on the day of the announcement they will think twice about future actions like this.