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January 06, 2006
Skype Announcements @ CES 2006: A Year Too Late?
There have been a number of product announcements at CES 2006 from the Skype ecosystem. Including: Wi-Fi Skype phones, USB Handsets, routers, and more. Given the long lead time it takes for an idea/innovation to get prototyped, developed, tested and introduced, one could easily spend 12-18 months to get a product out the door and into the consumer retail channel. But in this marketplace, speed to market matters and in this case, I have to wonder if these announcements are too little, (way) too late.
And it isn't as if these product announcements are not cool. Some of them really are, but if these products were available at CES 2005, their availability would have had a much more significant impact in the evolution of Skype and their underlying developer ecosystem, than the mass introduction of these products in 2006.
Skype was introduced in late in 2003. Frankly, I am quite surprised that it has taken so long for the communications accessories marketplace to jump en mass to the Skype bandwagon.
A year ago Skype was an independent company, and their existence put fear into the hearts of many in the communications industry. I used to ask friends whether they thought the world's Telco's would put up $3 billion dollars to get rid of the Skype threat. Turned out they didn't have to -- some of the same effect has happened as a result of the eBay/Skype acquisition. Some people have reported that the "soul" of the company has left (or is leaving) the building. Sad but true in some cases.
In 2006 it will be up to the disruptors at eBay/Skype to make a decision for themselves how many resources they want to direct toward their ecosystem and how much they just want to spend evolving Skype as a proprietary communications system.
The advent of these accessories doesn't take away from the closed nature of Skype. But their existence and a successful consumer push of these products could make Skype more pervasive. What I'm not sure about at the moment is how much people care and who Skype thinks will be helping to create the necessary push/pull on the retail side in order to keep these Skype accessories on the shelves and websites of the "big box" companies in the US and around the world.
It will be interesting to track the market acceptance of these accessory products and what it means to Skype and their embedded ecosystem if these products don't fly off of the store shelves.
Tags: Skype, voip, Jeff Pulver
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Posted by jeff on January 6, 2006 11:18 AM | Permalink
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Posted by: buy viagra online at September 4, 2007 08:37 PM
It's unfortunately the nature of the hardware business and companies in general. In "Silicon Valley" a company with a good idea goes from idea to funding a few months. In the rest of the world it takes a year sometimes two. In that time people loose interest, starve, take other jobs etc.
By my guess 99% of those early phase startups fail before they can get funded. Software companies can go from zero to first public release with $1m, $2-3m bring it to profitability, IPO or sale.
A hardware business needs $2-3m just to get the first production run of 1,000 out to the early adopters. To sell 10,000 of a $100 to produce item in that quantity takes around $5m in investment.
My experience in Israel was that although we had a great idea, most of the VC's did not "get it". Those that did could not afford that kind of startup money and either turned us down flat, or tried to take on partners and bickered among themselves on how big a cut to take instead of making a deal.
That's the real reason why the iPOD succeded. Steve Jobs did not have to shop around his idea, he just picked up the phone and said "make it so".
He could go from idea to product in people's hands while the idea was still fresh and long before the Koreans could make a cheap almost functional knock off and kill the market for him.
What you are seeing now is the result of planing in 2004 in Silicon Valley and 2003 in the rest of the world.
Geoff.
Posted by: Geoff Mendelson at January 7, 2006 11:08 AM