Some days I feel old. I can still remember getting excited about the move up to an IBM Selectric (with AutoCorrect!) from my first Brother manual typewriter. I remember standing in line at school in 1980 to run my punch cards through the reader and being handed inches of paper to parse through. I remember receiving my first fax, a handwritten letter from my father, and being blown away. None of these were seminal moments, except perhaps for me personally, but then as I began my career in technology, I’ve been fortunate to be on the bleeding edge of some major disruptions.

The first time I experienced the Web, with Netscape Navigator 1.0, was one of those moments. “How can you build a business model on ‘free’?” was a question that most of us in application software were asking ourselves when Navigator shipped, but then Google figured it out, in spades. The first time I heard Scott McNealy describe how the network is the computer in 1995, and I spoke with James Gosling at the first JavaOne conference about the implications of Java were two of those moments. The first time that I spoke with Peter Stanforth in 1990 about the implications for wireless mesh networking was yet another.

But this week, I had a doozy. In fact, I would dare label it an epiphany. But you’ll have to read on to find out what it is.

In 1996, Sun brought a guest speaker into its sales conference in Key West. Unfortunately, I can’t recall his name or title, but he was from a group within Nike that was focused on observing inner city kids, whom they considered to be the alpha trendsetters in fashion and function. The lesson I think we can all take away is that watching how kids use technology today can give us clues about what we (as mature, responsible adults) can expect to be doing in the future. Isn’t it amazing to watch people’s behaviors on planes? The first thing everyone does as soon as the plane lands is turn on their “cell phones” (multi-modal communicators would be more accurate), and begin texting. Irrespective of age, or the limitations imposed by SMS, “Generation Text” showed all of us that you can communicate effectively using a telephone keypad, abbreviations and your thumbs. Who would have thought that 30, 40 or 50-somethings would be typing away on their phones? In fact, I’m ROTFL just thinking about it.

I’m lucky to have two siblings in their early twenties to help me understand how to be relevant with my two teenage sons. I was introduced to Facebook in the early days by my kid brother and sister, and am amazed at what appears to be exponential growth. Notwithstanding the business model uncertainty, look at Facebook through the lens of a kid today. What is it?

Isn’t Facebook really the communications portal for kids today? I’m guessing most kids today have never used Outlook, and why would they?

Facebook contains their contacts, admittedly the “social” subset of what would be in my Outlook contact cards, but it is moving towards providing different views/access levels by categories. It offers “Presence”, rudimentary today, but that will change. Kids don’t use email anymore, they send Messages in Facebook. It’s similar to email but different, with real time notification (find me, follow me) and with the ability to respond via SMS. It has asynchronous chat via Wall postings and video communications (non-real time) through SuperWall. It allows me to stay on top of my communications via RSS feeds and SMS notifications.

Facebook is a social unified communications platform. Maybe this is what Microsoft saw when it recently made a half billion dollar investment in the company.

However, for all of its considerable strengths, Facebook’s biggest shortcoming today is real time, or synchronous communications, which is where my epiphany comes in.

Facebook should buy Skype.

Tomorrow.

I recently re-installed Skype (after taking a year break following the purchase of a new laptop), and am amazed at how it has stealthily and totally taken over my Web experience, including password protected applications like SharePoint. It’s not intrusive, it’s simply there. Everywhere. On every Web page with a phone number, Skype has found it, and turned that static number into an immediate click-to-call opportunity. Skype also has IM, Conference calling, Voice mail, Call forwarding. Now if you could tightly couple these features with the evolving capabilities of Facebook, what more would kids today need?

Email is dead.

Telephony is dead.

The transport layer is irrelevant.

Facebook + Skype is UC for Web 2.0.

Those of us who rely on UC today know that Facebook is not CEPB for the enterprise, but we can do much worse than to watch and learn from our kids.

That my .02! Be careful out there…

Martin Suter
President

The emergence of communications platforms based on open protocols is causing grief in the telecoms community. A recent article in Computerworld shows how the traditional telecom players are using the old canard of disorder to denigrate innovation and preserve what they see as their exclusive domain. The claim is that Session Initiation Protocol or SIP is becoming too complicated and difficult to implement and are calling for yet another new ITU protocol, unsurprisingly controlled by these same telecoms vendors. This is really quite duplicitous, even by the standards of the telecoms industry, especially considering that it is the telecoms vendors themselves that developed the bloated extensions to SIP that they are complaining about. The Internet Multimedia Subsystem is their attempt to keep applications, services and the means of billing for them in their own network core rather than on an application platform. Guess what: IMS lost. It is too complicated even for its own proponents and developers.

At its core, SIP is quite SIMPLE (sorry for the pun), which is why you get a book called SIP Communications for Dummies (supplied for free by SIP-friendly Avaya), freely download the actual standards from the IETF, and start developing using a number of free tools or commercial platforms, and to just get going. The SIP protocol is much like HTTP. At its base is a simple protocol, one that will evolve over time with extensions that meet real new needs. Tim Berners-Lee didn’t expect eBay, YouTube, Google and FaceBook to run over HTTP, but they do, as do billions of financial transactions and they all run over what is essentially still his original simple invention, HTTP, using open standards. HTTP itself is the agreed-to plumbing, modified and enhanced over time as new applications and requirements emerge. Whether the application is served by IIS or Apache, pulls data from Oracle or SQL Server; whether the application is presented on Firefox, IE, or Safari; whether it is rendered using .NET, PHP, ASP, Ajax or DHTML, all recent complex additions, they are all delivered over HTTP. Version 1.1 is still supported, if your needs are simple (no pun). It works.

Meanwhile you can’t even begin to look at ITU standards unless you’re in a very exclusive club. A print (print!) copy of the ITU.325 standard, like all ITU standards, requires paying a hefty fee with many zeros, and the tools needed to develop and test against it all require tools that have costs with even more zeros. The main reason why applications never prospered on ITU platforms is because nobody could ever do it easily and cheaply even for basic functionality. If you can’t do the basics easily how can anyone do anything useful?

Like HTTP, SIP began as a protocol to be developed and delivered on point platforms. In the mid-90’s there were as many variants of web server platform as there were web clients. Those days are long over, and those days are rapidly ending for SIP, especially in the enterprise.

There is no value in the plumbing and the protocol itself, because that comes with the platform. Open standards allow for true commoditization and costs rapidly drop to zero. Whether you choose Microsoft or Avaya, IBM or Oracle, you are buying into an ecosystem that offers as much richness as .NET, PHP, JAVA or Silverlight offer for the Web. Likewise, because these applications are SIP at their core, there will be interoperability between ecosystems, the only difference being how the application is rendered, and expectations will be the same on the client side regardless of where the application comes from.

Interconnection, interoperability and transparency between application ecosystems are paramount, and like the web, the real business opportunity is to innovate on top of the protocol, not to compete or resist the disruption. There are tremendous commercial opportunities even for the telecoms vendors, if their DNA allowed them to evolve.

Communications becomes about the applications, the platforms and their surrounding ecosystems.

Communications is not about the plumbing and the protocols. Just as HTTP before it, SIP has won.

Michael Slavitch

Lead, Technology Initiatives

I was inspired to write this post by an excellent review of Microsoft’s new Office Communications Server (OCS) by Tom Keating over at TMCNet.

Communications technologies represent a market that’s rapidly expanding and diversifying. Microsoft is a major part of this market shift and is largely focused on collaboration and productivity of knowledge workers (via seamless video conferencing, voice conferencing, instant messaging, rich presence, etc.). There’s some VoIP there, but customers will value OCS insofar as it masks the complexity of communicating across a wide diversity of devices/technologies that users can use to communicate.

In contrast, telephony as a stand-alone silo is dying. PBXs (including soft PBXs that replicate PBX functionality in software) are valued primarily in terms of the reliability of their dial-tone, with some of them providing basic unified messaging and call-flow management capabilities. It’s a product category that’s becoming rapidly commoditized, which typically means ever diminishing margins, except for the strongest, best recognized brands (e.g., HP, IBM and Apple have managed to make it through the commoditization of the desktop computer, but dozens of other companies didn’t).

I just marvel at the white space opportunities that Microsoft is helping to create as the industry lurches towards the integration of business process and business communications. Microsoft is continuing to do what it does best, that is to deliver a platform on top of which its partners can create and add value.

I can’t wait to come to work tomorrow and to keep doing just that.

That’s my .02…Be careful out there!

Martin Suter
President