Unlike death and taxes, mobile Skype is not certain

Vodafone, Orange, O2 and others will have to succumb to the market reality that the Skype offering is a win-win...
— Jim Courtney

Jim, you could be right, but I don't think so.

There's nothing inevitable about Skype having success with other carriers, Nokia or not. Nokia sales are down about 25% from last year and Nokia has negligible share of US markets. That's not a powerful position from which to bargain.

Skype had to sit down with 3 and negotiate terms, but Skype hasn't done much if anything with the other mobile carriers. Unlike 3, Skype@Nokia is a fête accompli, a take-it-or-leave-it proposition. The deal is a smack in the face to carriers who thought they had time to make their own Skype-killers, to wield lobbying power with regulators, to get their iPhone on and sell data plans without cannibalizing voice revenue.

Do you really think a year of 3 making a little coin will be enough to convince ranks of mobile execs to abandon strategies they just spent years and career capital to put in place? Do you really think they are excited about the chance to partner with an auction company that's been sucking the profit out of international calling and undercutting broadband voice pricing?

They are wedded to their value-added projects ("you don’t want to be just a dumb pipe do you?"), and Skype isn't even on the menu.

The opportunity for an upside and the threat if they don't sign on had better be overwhelming for them to risk their jobs, their shareholders' ire, and this quarter's cashflow. Skype's mobile bizdev team has a hard job ahead, and acceptance any time soon is far from certain.