Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
Number one, it is pretty much a one product company. Sure, Skype has tried to add value with services such as a downloadable 'lie-detector' - an application developed by KishKish that works with the Skype softphone to detect stress levels in the callers' voice; with games, file transfer and a business directory.
Some might be useful some are gimmicks and a quick visit to the Skype web site revealed no suggestion of the existence of any of them! Secondly it has only tenuous relationship with its customers.
But look at what this mooted gang of Skype killers has to offer: very long established relationships with their customers; good knowledge of those customers, and most importantly a range of services that span communications information and entertainment across the increasingly converged fixed and mobile worlds.
It's long been said that voice will become a free service bundled with all the other services delivered over communication networks, and if anyone is well placed to do this it is these guys: so long as they can manage the cannibalisation of their existing revenue streams.
They are all so big that for a long time they could afford to largely ignore the impact of services like Skype on their revenue streams. Those days are now well past and bold measures are called for.
To me the idea that 15 of them can come together with common purpose to implement and managed something like this seems less likely than the idea that they might want to. However at the practical level of making the technology work across their disparate interconnected networks: that is what they have been doing ever since the International Telecommunication Union was formed in 1865 to facilitate the interconnection of domestic telegraph networks in Europe.
Another possibility is that one major carrier could buy Skype. In April john Donahoe, CEO of Skype's owner eBay told Britain's Financial Times that it could be on the market. He said eBay would review Skype this year to see if it is helping its online auction and PayPal systems. EBay bought Skype for $US2.6 billion in 2005 but in October 2007 wrote down the value of the business to about half this figure.
However, not one of the mooted Skype Killer partners has a significant presence among consumers outside its home market. A Skype-like service in the hands of 15 of them properly managed and marketed and integrated with their other offerings could become a much more potent force than Skype owned by one of them alone.
How they would manage this to prevent it eating existing revenue streams before alternatives could be sufficiently ramped up is the sixty four million dollar question, but better to try than sit back and watch Skype take over the world.
David Bass
| For the fourth year in a row, IDC has placed content security provider Websense (NASDAQ: WBSN) at the top of the IDC Worldwide Web Security 2011 –…
How to Make Business Discovery Work for Your Business
Business Discovery takes its cues from consumer apps. Like Google, it encourages us- ers to hunt for and explore data without worrying about or even noticing the underly- ing technology. Their entire experience is working within an intuitive interface to get real-time, self-service results with only minimal training. ...more
Try an easy-to-use set of web-enabled
tools for business-class productivity services. Office 365 provides
anywhere-access to email, important documents, contacts, and calendars
on almost any device.
