Volpi's Skype Business Concept: SIP, social, lite, layoffs
- buy skype, replace p2p with SIP (standard-based, open, can interwork with other VoIP systems – like the Cisco phones)
- use social graph to augment other socials via API or develop its own social
- replace heavy client with flash/html/java version – make it lightweight for embedded devices (mobile)
- clean up staff and cut costs while private
[Links are mine.] Exhibits 1-20 to Declaration of S. Dargitz In Support of PI – PUBLIC, page six, redacted.
Discuss amongst yourselves.
tags: skype, indexventures, skypeforsale, joost, litigation, lawsuit, preliminaryinjunction, injunction, dannyrimer, mikevolpi, volpi
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Labels: business, financials, JoshSilverman, restructuring, SIP, skype, spinoff, spinout, voip
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15 Comments:
MuppetMaster was sooooo right...
I sigh, sigh again and again.
" replace p2p with SIP"
People, this is like saying replace a bridge with a car.
It makes ZERO sense. And once one blogger says it, it catches fire.
Please get some tech facts in order.
SIP is a protocol consisting of only a handful of messages used to setup and clear the media path (i.e. I wish to have an audio channel using G.711 codec).
Why people keep mixing P2P protocols into this I have no idea, except lack of knowledge of the elementals.
Weird - I wrote a blogpost saying the same things 3 months ago:
http://babyis60.wordpress.com/2009/08/02/the-best-job-ever-build-skype-2-0-in-a-year/
It is _totally_ do-able.
Lee is right - SIP isn't enough. It will take more than that, but I guess Mr Volpi was using it SIP as a short hand for 'A collection of open standards protocols'. The good news is that all the necessary tools are out there, Skype just has to acquire them.
Now that I've commented above I'm getting emails (lee.dryburgh@eComm.ec) from people who still don't "get it'" and misunderstood what I said. I only gave 30 seconds to the comment. Let me take 5-10 minutes for this one. I really don't have longer as the Emerging Communications Conference & Awards is in too weeks and I'm run over putting it together (http://eComm.ec).
When I said " replace p2p with SIP" makes ZERO sense I was meaning technically. I was not commenting from any other perspective.
Here is some education. Start with reading some background [1] first.
All VoIP is described as P2P in the lose sense because it ultimately involves two endpoints exchanging at least media (voice) directly with each other; i.e. peer-to-peer.
This first point to strike home, is that when people say Skype is P2P this means something completely different.
When one says that Skype is P2P what is meant is that NAT, firewall, user information (except usernames+passwords), etc. are handled in a decentralised fashion, among the endpoints themselves. i.e. a true P2P network. Again in other words, Skype forms a true P2P (i.e. overlay) network. Regular VoIP clients do not, Skype was a ground-breaker.
Now here is the laugh. Part of the reason for Skype's huge success was because SIP had (has) problems getting around NATs and firewalls. SIP even hard encodes the IP source address into messages (breaking turn of the century IETF guidance). To try and get around this, SIP uses STUN/TURN protocols. Skype uses a variation of STUN/TURN [1]) and to the amazement of the SIP community achieved this beautifully and in a decentralised (i.e. P2P) fashion.
So now do people see why I don't know if to cry or laugh in relation to " replace p2p with SIP"?
But in fact it gets worse.
The SIP community realising that it has been overtaken by Skype's engineering then sought to catch up. Instead of having to have SIP proxies and other middle-ware boxes (as regular SIP requires) they sought to build copy-cat Skype protocol, i.e. P2P version of SIP. This was to be called P2P SIP [5] but for the same reasons that the development of SIP was dogged, P2P SIP may never see the light of day.
So let's be clear and hammer a second point home. SIP can't replace the protocols that Skype uses to establish it's P2P overlay network. SIP is not a protocol for creating P2P networks. It can't. To establish P2P networks you use a DHT [4] protocol such as Chord [3]. It was proposed to develop a SIP which was P2P [5] but that does not seem to be going anywhere (and possibly for good reason but I don't have time to explain).
Therefore " replace p2p with SIP" can not be understood let alone acted on from a technical perspective, as it carries no meaning. If it carries zero meaning from a technical perspective, one can not execute from a business perspective.
And to be abundantly clear, Gizmo5 is not using SIP for P2P, because SIP can't do that and the IETF project to make a P2P SIP [5] is as said, not moving.
Are people now getting a better feeling as to why often I don't know if to laugh or cry on such matters? Regards, Lee
[1] www1.cs.columbia.edu/~salman/publications/skype1_4.pdf
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_SIP
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chord_(peer-to-peer)
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_hash_table
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer-to-peer_SIP
"clean up staff and cut costs while private" suggests to me Volpi saw an IPO as the next liquidity event.
The first three points are strategically simple: Skype should be everywhere people want to talk. That's good, but it's not enough. Talk itself is a commodity with relatively low barriers to entry. You see facebook, myspace, second life, and other directory providers adding IM and voice calling as a feature. In other words, Skype could take those hills but won't be able to keep them.
Skype needs to add value beyond carriage.
I don't understand what Lee is disagreeing with here. SIP and P2P as he outlined are orthogonal concepts. That's exactly why you can replace a P2P SYSTEM with a SIP, XMPP, H.323 or any other similar based SYSTEM. It's clearly understood, with Volpi's statement, we are talking about changing a whole architecture and not one protocol. Volpi's statement is totally valid technically and in my opinion strategically valid his argument can be interpreted as one for interoperability and choice of services/devices.
Shidan, what are you on my friend? lol ;)
"you can replace a P2P SYSTEM with a SIP, XMPP, H.323 or any other similar based SYSTEM."
So you propose that Skype eliminates all of a sudden their main competitive advantage and build instead a centralised service and start building out costly infrastructure rather than using the CPU/storage of the endpoints (Skype users)? So they roll the clock back 7 years ago and do what everyone else was doing back then ;) Come on ROFLMAO
Thats not true. Skype's competitive advantage was excellent marketing, a great user experience, introducing the service at the right time and partnering with the right people for a very solid infrastructure. Yes, I will acknowladge, the protocol back in the days made a difference for at least three of the above and it all relates to NAT traversal and automated configuration.
Today, this is not the case though; networks and devices speak and understand VoIP architectures to a level that was non existant even 3 years ago and aren't blind anymore to SIP. Contrary to what you are saying, 7 years ago a massive decentralized system was not the norm for voice communications that IP and SIP architectures brought us.
However there is a big difference between P2P and decentralization and people just like to jump on the p2p bandwagon because it sounds "cool" even when there is no evident fit.
It's interesting that even at layer 3 level people are realizing that decentralized communications with central control, much like how the most complex communications systems in nature work, have some unique advantages. Take a look at projects like OpenFlow where they are taking the most fundimental of P2P overlays and rethinking it's merits.
Beyond all this, I think the benefits of an open and unified communications framework outweigh the effort and man hours put into building a SIP aware infrastructure as the norm.
Skype has about as much technical competitive advantage with their proprietary P2P system that Joost did over Youtube. Wasn't really a great advantage. I wonder where Joost would be today if it started on the path to linked meta-data and an easy to acces web interface when it came out.
Sorry Shidan, it's clearly not an issue your are versed in technically, so for me there is not much point in responding or it will be one "education" after the other, sucking my time away. Hope to see you soon and you can "hate" me ;)
How bout this Lee, next time we meet I'll be more than happy to give you a lesson on everything you obviously don't understand about P2P systems :P Now we're both sounding like 12 year olds :)
A few points for readers who might think you have some rational points:
1) For any VoIP providers, and this includes Skype, interfacing with the PSTN is the expensive and centralized part.
2) SIP provides for a decentralized media path and extreme architectural flexibility.
3) Skype's security model, sure 256 bit AES on every call is great and that whole system is very centralized by the way. SIP's security model is wonderfull as well and they could have something just as secure that was actually
inter-operable with the world.
4) Its not Skype's P2P nature that makes it NAT friendly. Evidence points to similar systems as STUN and TURN and the fact that it has access to a centralized login server over TCP. I have a feeling the technical teams at Skype are bright enough to make a SIP based architecture a great user experience as well.
5) Look at how much infrastructure, devices and services are being built with SIP in mind. If I were Skype I'd want to be part of that as well.
6) Global Index: it's kind of silly to talk about decentralized user lookup when you have all these other centralized bottlenecks that actually make a difference. Further, in terms of efficiency, it was much nicer downloading media from napster than kazaa. Kazaa had the advantage of being harder to control by authorities, that use case made sense.
Fortunately Skype has some extremely bright people who have done a wonderful job building an excellent system way ahead of the curve and and I'm pretty convinced, unlike you, they understand that it's time to switch to to a more open platform that can interact with a much wider set of services and devices. The challenges have changed.
I'm not going to say anything else further on this either, this conversation isn't going anywhere.
I look forward to drinks next time we meet and I'd be interested to know how your clients are using RDF triples, that might actually be something interesting to talk about.
Have I just experienced 2 AlphaGeeks (new term for me) going head to head?
There has been many attempts, fact is nobody has been able to come up with a SIP-based "something" similar to Skype in terms of what most users think #1: Skype works.
Google chose XMPP over SIP for good reason.
Cross posting here and on Dan York’s blog…
So a few points, in no particular order:
Lee mentioned (as have others before) that P2PSIP is “copy-cat Skype”. This always bothers me, not because we came first (we certainly didn’t) but because it wasn’t my vision for P2PSIP (although others certainly had that view) . When I came up with P2PSIP and brought it to the IETF, I wanted to do things SIP couldn’t do at all. SIP can theoretically build a system that looks like Skype. To me, the interesting areas for P2PSIP were distributed softswitches/corporate IM (config-free small office, etc.), rapid response (quickly set up a communications system after a natural disaster), ad-hoc clusters for IM/app sharing (think Google wave away from the Internet), and vendors adding voice to apps without becoming an ISP. You could do a Skype-like service with P2PSIP (sort of: see below) but that wasn’t really the idea that got me started creating P2PSIP.
To me, Skype’s success was solving the NAT issue and getting the user experience right. P2P was a means to an end/efficiency multiplier, but not the reason for the success. Skype just worked. SIP’s major flaw is embedded IP addresses. Skype avoids this, uses media relays (P2P, but could have been centralized) and “falls back” (in the worst case) to tunneling over port 80. Users love this. Administrators and protocol purists hate it as it breaks traffic characterization, shaping, etc. Skype’s closed garden (one protocol stack) also ensured things just worked. Closed gardens and HTTP tunnels are at odds with the SIP goal of vendor/carrier interoperability. The two achieve different goals. (Today, many folks believe ICE with ISP-provided relays has addressed the SIP NAT problem. It looks promising, but until we have a Skype-sized Internet deployment, some say the jury is out. Time will tell.)
You could theoretically deliver a Skype-like experience with either a SIP or P2PSIP solution. Pure P2PSIP is very decentralized (every node is a peer and central servers are only used for obtaining a certificate), so you would need a hybrid approach if you want to maintain customer control. You could also use regular SIP with ICE, and many, many servers if you could solve the scalability problems. The best approach might be conventional SIP between the endpoints and a cloud of servers, with the servers sharing information using P2P. This ends up looking much like a SIP version of Skype’s super-peer model, executed in the cloud.
All this still begs the question of what happens to the Skype ecosystem of hardware, etc. If you go SIP, what do you break in the process? As Dan York and Shidan Gouran point out, Skype has many options, lots of great engineers, and lots of cash, but nobody outside of Skype knows what they will do.
As an aside to Lee’s comment on P2PSIP as a standard (it is fair to say adoption in product has been very slow, I’m sorry to say): The standard is moving, just at the (glacial) pace of standards, which can be frustrating for idea guys like Lee or I. In the early days, P2PSIP had lots of ideas, chatter, and excited non-standards folks, so work moved quickly. Today, with an accepted draft in progress and a more mainstream standards audience, iterations have slowed. That said, things are moving, there is strong interest, and a lot of hard work by the editors and participants.
My biggest worry is the protocol becoming too cumbersome. We are building a very flexible, universal DHT protocol with mandatory ICE and TLS/DTLS security. This is great for some scenarios, but overkill for others (ad-hoc, for example), and I worry the bulk may make it unsuitable for some of the scenarios I first imagined. I think many of these may migrate to the cloud. DHTs will be used, but as a means to distribute data among servers, not all the way to the edge as I first anticipated. Things change. Progress is good. I’m very excited to see how DHT principals in the cloud might solve many of the problems posed of a pure P2P approach. (eComm talk for SF, Lee?)
David
I am with Lee on this issue - SIP and Skype are totally different beasts - the technical and practical challenges involved in switching out the current Skype protocols and replacing them ith SIP is massive, so large in fact that it could never happen.
The reason that Skype took off so quickly was that it 'just worked' and was free - the result being a wonderful user experience the like of which was unprecedented in the VoIP World. Skype (and it's associated protocols) have got such widespread acceptance now that it has become a de-facto standard.
The IPR issues that Skype is currently facing will do little to affect the useage - but WILL affect the ability of individuals like Mr Volpi of making large amounts of money out of it!
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