Telirati

This newsletter, written 4 years ago, describes a lesson still valid today: New technologies have to be an improvement over what they replace - a lesson VoIP has only now applied with the superior sound quality available with Skype. Telirati Newsletter #48: What Roger Ebert Can Teach Us About Telephony What can a movie critic, a fat man in a tweed jacket, teach us about telephony? A lot, as you will see. Telephony, because it is so widely used, is about what people want, much the same as making and showing movies. In a recent column, Roger Ebert, a noted movie critic, takes his gaze away from the screen and looks into the projection booth. There he finds digital cinema technology trying to make an unwise leap and landing under the wheels of the juggernaut of refined existing systems: I have seen the future of the cinema, and it is not digital. No matter what you've read, the movie theater of the future will not use digital video projectors, and it will not beam the signal d...

In this newsletter, written in 2004, I made a number of predictions. My scorceard looks like this: Apple did make a UNIX my mother could use. But now they face the task of taking advantage of, rather than being run over by, the coming desktop Linux wave. Microsoft, after the huge technology achievement of Windows 2000, did face the challenge of remaining relevant, and largely failed. Microsoft isn't moving fast enough, hasn't had a break-out into new product categories - with the possible exception of XBox, and hasn't created any new product categories to dominate. Until recently I was right about VoIP being irrelevant because incumbent networks could comfortably drop prices. Cisco is finally getting some traction (by default) in VoIP CPE, and Skype has discovered pricing and a business model that (probably) works. I was thuddingly wrong about VoATM. Never heard of VoATM? Yeah. Anyway, DSL and VoATM are wrong and deserve to lose. VoIP will set you free to buy se...