Skype Journal: Fall VON 2006 - Whither IM?
September 12, 2006 06:18 PMMonday afternoon's first Fall VON 2006 plenary session, IM: The State of Presence, featuring a panel of executives and managers from the GYMAS-five representing over 90% of the IM usage worldwide:
- Dan Casey, Director, Windows Live VoIP and Messenger Product Management, Microsoft
- Jeff Bonforte, Director of Voice Product Management, Yahoo!
- Nitzan Shaer, Director, Mobile Devices, Skype
- Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager, Real Time Communications & Google Talk, Google
- Ragui Kamel, Sr. Vice President & General Manager, AOL Voice Services, America Online.
As mentioned previously Carl Ford ran his usual vibrant Q&A format, offering each member of the panel an opportunity to provide commentary on several topics surrounding IM and where it is going. It was a very informative and stimulating discussion overall. Carl's questioning covered why IM, video usage, the role of presence, mobile reach, business models and projections in for the future.
Why do users want Voice with Instant Messaging? From the students avoiding contention when sharing one phone line in a five-student apartment to business productivity enhancement, we heard stories about new scenarios enabled where IM and voice facilitate social networking to newly announced collaborative applications that share spreadsheets. Oh, and for the younger generation, IM allows students to avoid being seen holding discussions in the classroom; did I say to allow private discussion sessions in the boardroom? The new challenge arises when a group of youth want to do a conference call but Stephanie is is not on IM but at the mall shopping for new shoes.
Nitzan talked about how IM with Skype allows users to create one centralized ID that can be used across weblogs, sharing pictures, and enhancing a discussion using video.
While Carl was looking for any data on usage of different modalities associated with IM, the discussion largely centered on video. The consensus is that about 20% to 30% of IM users use video but mostly as recipients of "broadcast" video; the ratio of "broadcast" users to users doing two-way video sessions is 10:1. Jeff pointed out that, while it is an older application, there is still significant use made of Yahoo Messenger's legacy Webcam service.
Nitzan made the following points about Skype usage:
- "free" has seen international voice minutes skyrocket
- "free" video has found many users leaving their video camera and microphone on continuously in personal reality video
- there is a level of usage driven significant grandparent-grandchild video
- the opportunity that still exists is shown by some 2005 numbers for voice communications:
- 40 billion minutes of PC-to-PC VoIP
- on landline PSTN: 3.8 trillion minutes
- on wireless: 5 trillion minutes
- the ratio of wireless to wired minutes continues to rise
- the challenge for all VoIP player is to increase awareness and installation of VoIP across the 99% of voice users who still rely solely on PSTN or wireless.
Carl then turned the discussion to "Presence: an addiction or a turn-off". Jeff pointed out that presence is a blessing and a curse for power users. He then brought into the picture iotum and its Relevance Engine, pointing out that this is the next level of sophistication for presence. Dan finds Windows Live Messenger is caught between supporting social networks and providing a communications platform. Nitzan sees a scenario where users will be able to expose different elements of presence to different groups of Contacts. However, the general consensus is that Presence will be evolve to a platform whereby it is embedded into applications via API's such that users can choose those features they personally wish to use and not be burdened by unwanted features.
The discussion then turned to mobility issues which will become the subject of another post.
Later there was a discussion of business models; here there was general agreement that advertising provides the primary acceptable business model for IM. Supporting this was the fact that AOL recently made its client freely available to any Internet user, eliminating their monthly subscription fee (which also included dialup).
Most telling was Nitsan's comment; he pointed out that currently SkypeOut is free for calls within Canada and U.S. and for landline calls within France to the end of the year "but that's only the beginning". I guess we can expect to hear more on the subject between now and December 31. Skype is partnering on Click-to-Call; in this regard, it is known that advertisers will pay a premium to have such a call go through to close on a prospect's enquiry.
When asked about where they see IM in eighteen months Ragui of AOL had the most concise response with his five points - which also seemed to be the consensus of the discussions:
- greater internetworking
- more open platforms for third party partners
- a move towards nomadic (wireless) devices to give IM broader reach and access
- integration of IM and voice into applications
- all five would be on the same panel at Spring VON 2008
Alec Saunders has provided a detailed report and his perspective on the session.
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