In yesterday’s Skype Journal, Phil Wolff blogs about his boredom with Skype and questions whether or not the “top dog” can inspire again and capture passion from users in 2012. While certainly the company saw its days of disruption and innovation, users today want new inspiration and better quality. Because of its early market entry, the technology may be widely adopted (hundreds of millions of users according to Wolff’s post) – but more often than not, in our experience and research, its use is also accompanied by complaints about usability and quality, especially when it comes to group calls. So if the company is “pleased with being boring,” where does that leave users? And what does it mean for competitors like Vivox?
I for one can tell you we are nowhere near complacency in the voice market. Innovations continue, especially in the areas of Mobile VoIP and social communication across consumer experiences. At Vivox, we know that voice will be everywhere – regardless of what network you use, or what device you “dial” from. Users want to be able to talk to each other from anywhere at anytime. Expecting users to continue to come to you and to communicate in a way that isn’t easy and natural – using whatever device you decide to make your tech work from – and to drive adoption among their communities, is a dying model. Users want to communicate naturally – as easily as they do in person (I.e. don’t require them to be in a certain place or all have the same tech in order to communicate with voice). Change is a must – and we know we’re driving it at Vivox. Our technology is device-agnostic and multiplatform, which means users can truly have their voice anywhere – whether they’re in a game, on Facebook or on their smartphone.
In 2011, Vivox introduced the world’s first free single-click voice chat for Facebook through the introduction of Bobsled (in conjunction with T-Mobile). Later, we introduced free calling to any US number from Bobsled, and the Bobsled web app for always-on accessibility anywhere on the web, iOS and Android apps. We continue to innovate to make consumer communications seamless, easy and natural from anywhere at anytime, to anyone.
So while we don’t necessarily agree that Skype is boring – they’ve done a lot to pave inroads for consumer voice over the years – we do believe that their lack of innovation and new product breakthroughs is an opportunity for companies like ours. We’re certainly not content to sit back and hope that users do the acquisition for us – we’re coming to them with exciting developments, new products and an even more exciting year of innovation in the voice space. Voice will be everywhere, and we believe that’s so not boring.