Nokia, mobile operators, and VoIP, the story continues
The announcement of Skype on Nokia phones finally came during the Mobile World Congress after years of rumors. At least they announced it being available on the N97.
It seems to me that this is again Nokia sending up a test balloon. They have done this before with their built-in SIP UA in several phones. The deployment of the UA was later scaled back.
Dean Bubley gives some interesting observations around this and Nokia’s relation to mobile operators in his blog. I agree with him. It all seems to be about branding and owning the end customer.
It is, however, strange to me, that Nokia chooses to do it with Skype. All they do is to provide cheaper phone calls, and as we have seen cheaper and cheaper usually means a lose-lose game. So why not provide something new value added to strengthen their brand instead of attacking the long standing basic revenue stream of the mobile operators? It is after all easy for the operators to counter by cheaper mobile CS calls.
I believe the future of mobile VoIP is as an integrated part of a bigger service. Examples are a mobile component of UC and video conferencing.
March 3rd, 2009 at 3:04 am
Roar,
I disagree about Nokia not providing something new with Skype. This is not only cheaper phones – it’s presence on phones, and with a system that users are most likely to have already (=Skype). And it’s done with full integration into the address book.
If it was only cheaper, it wouldn’t be worth it – in that I totally agree.
Tsahi
March 4th, 2009 at 12:17 am
Tsahi,
You are right, presence adds value. However, for presence to work well you need a nice UI that makes you able to monitor status. If you have to first go into the address book to check if a person is online, the value is less in mind. Also this has been touted as calling cheap as far as I can see.
Roar