Silos Are For Grain, Not VoIP
Wall Street Journal has a long piece about new VoIP phones, but misses the point about lack of interoperability between various issues. I wrote about this last week, here and also for CNN Money. Its appropriate that we address the issue one more time …
Context & Ripple Effects
Om Malik has been making the same argument for weeks: the new wave of VoIP phones getting friendly mainstream write-ups works fine inside each carrier's garden and nowhere else. He laid out the interoperability problem in his own posts and in a CNN Money column, and the Wall Street Journal's long feature on the new handsets, in his view, reviewed the hardware while skipping the constraint that decides whether any of it is useful.
The critique lands in the middle of a broader broadband argument he has been running since his October 2005 piece asking whether bandwidth mergers were enough — carriers consolidating the pipe while leaving the voice experience fragmented at the device.
First-order effects
- Buyers of the new VoIP handsets face devices that cannot interoperate across systems, meaning the purchase decision is really a commitment to one provider's silo.
- The Wall Street Journal's gadget-focused framing now has a public rebuttal from a specialist analyst with a CNN Money platform, forcing the interoperability question into the mainstream conversation.
Second-order effects
- Carriers bundling locked VoIP phones come under pressure as interoperability becomes a stated buying criterion rather than a technical footnote, threatening the lock-in their bundles rely on.
- Whoever solves cross-system voice compatibility gains a differentiator that pure handset design cannot match, shifting competition from hardware features to platform reach.
Third-order effects
- If siloed VoIP persists, control of the customer migrates to whoever owns the voice platform rather than the handset maker — the same moat-shifting dynamic seen whenever closed systems meet open expectations in telecom.
The trend: Consumer VoIP is heading toward a contest between carrier-locked phone silos and interoperable, web-connected voice platforms, with interoperability determining who keeps the customer.