[Asterisk-Users] Asterisk compare with Skype

[Brian Capouch]

Kerry Garrison wrote:
> Why would this ever change or need to change? Many many people are quite
> happy with how Skype works and would never need anything else. Its like
> saying why would anyone use ICQ/AIM/Yahoo/MSN when you can run your own
> email server. The application is similar but still very very different.
> 

Skype obviously intends to "own" their customers, so that they can 
dictate who can do what, when, how, and at what cost.  That's where 
their brilliance comes in: because it's totally proprietary and totally 
locked down, once they've got someone hooked, they've got them.  Just 
like our favorite existing OS monopoly.

Single economic chokepoints ultimately do damage to the consumer, even 
if the consumers of the product are nominally happy with the product itself.

Such is the case with the "Microsoft tax" of multiple billions of 
dollars that IT shops are forced to spend working around the many 
problems induced by their many design and operational flaws.  Since it's 
infrastructure that has to be maintained, people conveniently ignore the 
fact that it acts like an implicit tax.  Ask the poor guy who runs the 
IT shop where I work, who now has fulltime employees who do nothing but 
deal with the vast and never-ending portfolio of problems that come 
along with our use of "the defacto standard."

Few people saw the M$ mess coming back in the early adoption days.  Once 
a certain market dominance has been reached, as Microsoft knows all too 
well, any number of flaws have to be tolerated by the user base, because 
the perceived cost of switching to something else is too high.  That's 
exactly how Microsoft gets away with its shoddy software engineering: 
once you are the only game in town, you get to dictate to your customers 
and not the other way around.

As an e.g., is there anyone who really believes it's accidental that 
their EU-mandated "Media Player Free" version of Windows, to be sold in 
Europe, breaks when people try to use RealPlayer?  Once you have taken 
away people's choice, whether by chance or design, you can do nasty 
things like this and get away with it.

At least in my case, the anti-Skype propaganda is designed to insure 
that I have the foundation to go back to everyone in (?) five years and 
say, "See?  I told you so.  We knew that closed proprietary solutions 
were bad, but the market went galloping off in that direction again anways."

Better would be the scenario of Skype having to open themselves up, 
which is only going to happen if they encounter competition.  Well I may 
be a tiny voice in the wilderness in the face of the Skype stampede. 
That doesn't make this stance wrong per se.

B.