Comments: Features … Again

I disagree, Skype has one feature that IM coupled with a phone doesn't have, that is the ability to send an IM to someone asking if they are available for a call, then seamlessly calling them via the same application.

In the PSTN/IM world you have to send an IM, wait for a response, then dial (assuming you know the phone number or have it on speed-dial, otherwise you have to know or look for a phone number). Using Skype it's much simpler and all done via a single interface.

Score one for Skype. :-)

Posted by Irwin Lazar at April 21, 2005 01:40 PM

Not necessarily. Consider a PC that has a dialup modem, an address book that contains the IM address and phone number of your buddies. In your scenario, the IM client has to instruct the dialer application to initiate a PSTN call via the modem.

A simple way to think of the general solution is the following: since IP applications function independent of the network architecture, it should be able to handle the case where one segment of the data transfer (voice in this case) happens to use PSTN.

In the ultimate analysis, all these new features that are predicated to come are nothing more than CTI applications.

Posted by Aswath at April 21, 2005 02:25 PM