As you may have heard recently, Jeff Pulver issued a call for VoIP companies to provide more than just the old-style telephone service. Jim Courtney over at Skype Journal wrote a lengthy piece about how Skype, along with companies that use the Skype API, have met Jeff's challenge for innovation.
Skype does run on a number of different devices-PC, Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, and the Nokia N800 tablet. There are certainly a lot of novel applications out there for Skype. However, if you notice, most of those applications are on a Windows PC only. They don't run on Mac, Linux, Windows Mobile, or the Nokia N800 tablet. There's innovation out there, but it's reach is limited.
A frequent complaint I hear about Skype from application developers is that the meat and potatoes of the Skype network, namely the ability to do proper call control, is not available to Skype developers. Only recently did they put in the Call Transfer API. I'm sure there are a ton of other APIs that developers would love to have to be able to more fully control the Skype experience.
I think Jeff would probably not accept this as the kind of innovation he is looking for. Not because the apps aren't innovative-they are-but because the architecture implementing them is not truly open. What do you think? Leave your thoughts on this in the comments.
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