MILES TO GO
Reports of an upgrade of internet telephony features in Yahoo! Messenger are being magnified into a Yahoo! vs. eBay/Skype battle on memeorandum as of yesterday. Case in point is the provocative headline "Feeling a little bit of buyer's remorse, eh eBay?" by John Paczkowski of Good Morning Silicon Valley.
Read the post, and there's nothing really pertinent to the catchy headline. This is a pattern that's repeated often in other posts by this author on this subject, examples being "Skype to eBay: No, we don't accept Paypal" and "Yes, but who in their right mind wants to talk to eBay bidders on the Phone?" Read those posts and you'll again find little that connects to the pithy headlines.
But this post is not about disconnect between headlines and the content in this or other cases. The author is simply doing what bloggers and writers often do...grab the reader's attention any way possible.
While not as disconnected, there have been other posts again painting Yahoo!'s internet telephony pricing plans as a BLOW for eBay/Skype. Om Malik's post titled "For Skype, one more headache called Yahoo!" and Eric Auchard's "Yahoo! undercuts Skype on voice call rates".
While they all make good points, I think it's important to look at the forest for the trees.
As I've mentioned of and on for a long time and is now generally well understood, VOICE IS BECOMING JUST ANOTHER APPLICATION, on computers large, small and mobile. In a post on the eBay-Skype acquisition this fall, I noted:
"Wired and wireless voice communications are being cut loose, from the predictable, steady, metered subscription revenue streams of the past few decades, to having to fend for themselves.
In the eBay/Skype case, they'll have to be supported through seemingly esoteric but potentially potent new revenue opportunities like "pay-per-call" (a twist on the "pay-per-click" model popularized by Internet advertising companies...
Even these opportunities to extract any kind of pricing for voice communications at all, may be fleeting, like a fistful of sand running through one's fingers."
The pricing for internet telephony whether within eBay/Skype or within the Yahoo! family of products while important tactically is utterly secondary to the strategic imperative of using internet voice and video in new mainstream ways. The applications could center around commerce, content or community, all Web 2.0 style, greased by communications.
Yahoo! and eBay both have big, core businesses that can subsidize any number of voice initiatives should the need arise. Case in point was Yahoo! aggressive pricing a few months ago when it entered the music subscription business against Real's Rhapsody, Napster and other players.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the wired and wireless telephony industries being targeted here are still massive in revenues and profits. There's a substantial relative pricing umbrella to use for all the upstarts, GYMAAAE and others, to use in deploying their new applications, services and features. There's enough for all of them to grow for a long time to come. It's far from being a zero sum game.
Overall, as we see new applications and upgrades being announced by the GYMAAAE companies in the time head, we need to keep in mind as exciting they may seem especially in their lower relative pricing, each one is but one scene in a long drama still continuing.
We've all got a long way to go in turning voice telephony into JUST a feature in a mound of applications.
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