VoIP – It is what it is.

VoIP is dead. VoIP is NOT Dead! Or not?

Skype started this meme in September with the headline-grabbing pronouncement that VoIP is dead [1].  A good chunk of the blogosphere fixated on the statement, provoking purple pundit Jeff Pulver to step away from his-now favorite son social media and defend the honor of his grown-up child [2].

What Jeff needs to realize is that his child of VoIP has moved out of the house and is now a part of another family. He kind of gets that when he starts talking about the "Internet Communications Continuum," and how voice fits in with IM and messaging and presence and IP signaling, but he takes a lot of hot concepts and throws them into the blender, so that what comes out is a big grey goop that touches everything but means very little.

If social media is the Next Big Thing, then VoIP and IM and presence and all the rest are just technologies. Furniture, if you will. You may have cool, quality technology, but how it is put together is where the value exists.

Don't get me wrong, VoIP has done a  number of wonderful things, but Jeff really needs to be careful with what he puts in the blender if it is going to taste good. If you put VoIP in the blender with IM and presence and video, you come out with unified communications - something businesses arguably are just starting to accept. Throw in something too consumer-ly sweet like Internet TV, and you come up with a blend that is too cloying for businesses, on the one hand, and too complex in flavors for consumers.

If I get away from blenders and smoothies, another way to think about this is looking at the standard RJ-11 phone jack on the wall. VoIP is kinda-sorta-almost-but-not-quite as mundane as an RJ-11 jack these days. It's there, it provides voice akin to an analog phone call (most of the time) and we take it for granted.

VoIP simply "is what it is." (Urban Dictionary, definition 4 - Don't overthink the situation, keep things simple, don't overanalyze). It's not "dead" by any stretch of the imagination, but it isn't the roaring "We Will Crush The Telecom World" movement that it was a couple of years ago. The movement to VoIP and Next Generation Networks -- away from TDM -- is now mainstream, not radical, revolutionary thought.

- Doug [3]