The August 9 article in eWeek IM Interoperability: It’s the Business Model, Stupid provides a warning for the future of VoIP.
This is what we face down the road if we let proprietary closed-protocols, such as Skype, win in the VoIP space.
So do we want that kind of “interoperability”? The sad thing is, with IM, at least one could argue that there were no open-standards for IM and presence when AOL built AIM. That’s not the case this time, with VoIP. The standards exist for VoIP, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), and we better hope there can be a business model made around it, or we will be right back in the IM soup in a few years with VoIP, where each service runs their own proprietary protocols, where we need an ID on a half-dozen networks to be reachable, or to reach our contacts.