Martin Geddes observes that “[Skype] hasn’t taken the feature set very far past the PSTN.” He goes on to suggest that currently Skype can’t do much beyond what one can do with all-you-can-eat PSTN plan and an IM client. Indeed I have been saying for a long time that this statement is true in general and not just for the present time.
So once again, there is no hope of new features and arbitrage business is temporal. What do we do?
Posted by aswath at April 21, 2005 11:36 AM
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 PMNot 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