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July 09, 2003
More on the Phone
It seems Alex Salkever of Business Week magazine is starting to catch onto the fact that Baby Bells are rapidly dying. He recently wrote an article singing the praises of the new iChatAV system, mostly with regards to the high quality audio that can be achieved through the system on even narrowband connections.
Oddly enough he seems to believe that this technology will replace a telephone system, a point to which I disagree completely. Currently the architecture for Instant Messaging is not suitable for a large scale directory service. More importantly, there is no way to update others of a potentially new screen name you've attained, nor any way to verify the authenticity of whom you are calling. Until these points are solved I don't see IM becoming a serious threat to Baby Bells. Vonage on the other hand does seem like it will be a massive threat. I can only see the iChatAV system providing an inroad for people to discover services like Vonage.
Posted by Dan at July 9, 2003 08:03 AM