Viva la Vonage!!!
The Vonage saga winds on…near death experience, the ouster of a CEO, the temporary replacement by Cistron, who is barred by the SEC from actually holding the position, and the vultures are circling, circling, circling.
The fascinating aspect to me is the numerous bloggers (most notible, here) who rail against Vonage for the crime of being “simple landline replacements”. As if that’s a bad thing…
It’s an interesting mentality among many of the small startups who pride themselves on their “innovation”, primarily because that is all that they have. The startups tend bash the Vonages of the world for not being innovative enough, bash the AT&T’s and Verizons and Time Warners and Comcasts of the world for simply being big behemoths with no imagination. The jealousy, my friends, does not become you.
Sure, innovation is good, and for those of you out there actually doing something interesting and innovative, I applaud you. Still, remember that scale is not an easy thing–going from a small server farm to a mass-market infrastructure is not just child’s play and–believe it or not–requires innovative skills on both technical and business fronts. Sure, Vonage didn’t deliver every gizmo of voice over IP–but, they delivered some of the most useful ones and, by and large, they did it quite well. The scale that they achieved was quite impressive; the fact that my redneck neighbor down the road is a customer is astounding.
OTOH, per an e-mail I forwarded you, I’m not really impressed with the patentable qualities of at least some of the things Verizon is trying to claim.
Not a question of railing against Vonage. The problem is that they built a service which is basically the same as Verizon, but only cheaper. how will that sustain them in the Marketplace?
If they did, then so what? Verizon has the number of customers that they do because declining or not, there are still a lot of people buying plain old vanilla telephone service.
Nevertheless, Vonage’s offering was not just Verizon over IP. Their solution integrated in the most obvious and useful features of voice over IP–voicemails delivered via email, followme/findme features, multiple DIDs on a single phone, and a few more.
Vonage is not just POTS–sure, you can’t place sip to sip calls, sure you can’t do a million other things. To people who play around in voice over IP all day, the Vonage feature-set are just the tip of the iceberg; nevertheless, for your tens and hundreds of millions still on POTS, it has an amazing feature set. Considering that it offered a great advance in features, good value, and–most importantly–was quite user friendly and accessable, from a product offering, they were able to be fairly sustainable.
Remember that most of the actual growth in the residential voice over IP market (in terms of dollars and subscribers) is actually by the cable companies these days. And their offering is just plain old telephone service without even the Vonage feature set. If you’re talking about cool technology, well, then it falls short. But, market sustainability? The market is actually favoring the old standby–boring old POTS, whether delivered over copper or IP.