Skype: Stand-by for violence

The emergence of the open telephony platform built on Internet  for telephony will be violent, chaotic and messy according to Skype GM for Audio and Video Jonathan Christensen. He forecasts that anyone who seeks to stand in the way of open platforms will be doomed and says the only innovation from the telecom sector in the last 20 years has been the advent of mobility. 

"I think that anybody who has not figured out that the Internet is the platform and that there isn't any such thing as walled gardens that will survive, or sub-networks [such as AOL tried] that are going to survive, those people are doomed," Christensen says in a long interview with ecommmedia.com.  "The intersection of these worlds is going to be chaotic. It's going to be violent. It's going to be messy for a while but it is going to happen, and the Internet will survive as the one open platform. I think that you are only going to see further disruption of the telecom industry and the emergence of totally new businesses that we can't imagine today."

Christensen says the result will be very rich, open, cheap and accessible communications. "This is going to be not just a game changer for the telecom industry, but will be a change agent for all of humanity."

Maybe Skype could get with the open spirit and make its service interoperable with other VoIP offerings?

For more:
- Lee Dryburgh interviewed Christensen for ecommmedia.com Article [1]

Related articles:
Skype struggles to find real revenues Report [2]
Skype resists inter-operability Report [3]