Skype gripe

Inter­est­ing post over at The­Unof­fi­cialAp­pleWe­blog; My gripe with Skype and five good rea­sons why you shouldn’t can­cel your other phone ser­vices just yet.

To make it short, Greg Scher ques­tions the hype about Skype while focus­ing on why you might want to hold on to your reg­u­lar con­nec­tion for a bit. And he’s quite right. VOIP isn’t new, some peo­ple won’t find the qual­ity good enough for call­ing non-techers (who know what the deal is) and Skype is sort of mess­ing with ter­mi­nolo­gies, P2P and VOIP.

His five points are valid too:

You can’t receive calls from land lines, tra­di­tional VOIP ser­vices or cell phones.
…
No loca­tion aware­ness and No 911
…
You can’t use your land lines or cord­less phones
…
WiFi just isn’t per­va­sive enough…Yet.
…
You can’t take your address book with you…

But! If you dis­card the idea of aban­don­ing your land­line phone con­nec­tion (which you prob­a­bly swapped with a cell phone any­way — which makes the need for a sec­ond phone even more obvi­ous) — I don’t think it’s too bad. As far as I know, lit­tle boxes are avail­able to act as a bridge between your com­puter and your reg­u­lar hand­set and I guess it’s just a mat­ter of time before the address book prob­lem is solved. WiFi is nice (couldn’t live with­out it) but for most peo­ple, a nor­mal cabled con­nec­tion will prob­a­bly be sufficient.

And: The main dif­fer­ence between Skype and most sim­i­lar tech­nolo­gies before it is that it just works. Don’t under­es­ti­mate the power of ‘it just works’. Now it even (finally) work across plat­forms. Which can’t really be said about Net­meet­ing. And as the costs of mak­ing long dis­tance calls are really low I think my grand­mother will for­give the odd con­nec­tion drop — I can cer­tainly sur­vive not being able to dial 911.

So while I under­stand the con­cern, that true VOIP won’t be here for quite some time (heck, I’ve been to tech fairs in the mid-nineties where badly dressed VOIP peo­ple tried to con­vince us that at the end of ’99 we wouldn’t have reg­u­lar phones any­more), I can defi­nately under­stand why peo­ple are thrilled by the result so far.