I’ll take the occasion of the Macworld 2006 exp to harp on Apple a bit for its latent posture regarding the matter of Voice over IP, and do a bit of rumormongering myself. My believe is that Apple could probably be doing a lot more with IP telephony than their excellent-but-very-vertical iChat AV application–essentially just an I.M. client with support for AIM and Jabber protocols, voice chats, and video. It may even be the best free video-conferencing solution on the market, and its value may be multiplied by the fact that it works with GoogleTalk.
But why isn’t Apple doing more in this space? The iPod proved that untapped markets speak to Steve Jobs. Perhaps the black turtlenecked CEO of Apple isn’t interested in the VoIP industry because it sees a hodgepodge of private and public companies engaged in various marketing compaigns hocking international minutes for two cents a minutes and so forth. That just isn’t the sexy marketing appeal Steve Jobs likes to surround his product launches with. Perhaps Steve’s other problem with the VoIP service model embraced by Vonage and Packet8 is that, at least right now, it is very difficult to turn a profit by selling VoIP minutes to residential customers.
No, Steve would rather do a VoIP product that can stun Apple’s opponents for upwards of five years or more, creating a near-term sustainable product lifecycle that absolutely ruins the competition. Just like the iPod did. It’s so far ahead in brand recognition, product refinement, and iconic mainstream recognition that no other multimedia portable player can catch it. In fact, no portable ever will.
Can Apple, or anybody, innovate a VoIP product that has the potential to splash the way the iPod has?
Catchword that you read here FIRST: VoiPod. I don’t know what a VoiPod is, but I want one if it has an Apple logo on it…. Beause that logo almost, almost always means it’s going to be a damn good product.