I did say I was going to seed site this with some of my earlier predictions, and the ones I could remember were wrong. Which is slightly embarassing but there you go, never let it be said I'm not honest!

In the "how wrong can you be" pile today we have Skype. When Skype first burst onto the scene VOIP was a pretty new concept - ICQ was the dominent (only?) IM client and transmitting voice on the net was a pretty hit and miss affair.

There were two competing technologies at the time, or at least I viewed them as competing. SIP was just getting started as an attempt to generate an open standard protocol for transmitting voice over IP. (actually for the pedants SIP is one of a numper of related protocols needed to make this work, but it'll do for my purpose here). Skype meanwhile was proprietory and closed.  To be fair Skype always had noticably better voice quality right from the start. I said at the time though that it's closed, proprietory nature would be it's downfall as people were starting to talk about about standards, interoperability etc.

So what happened? Well it turned out that SIP and it's associated standards were a nightmare to get working on a PC - the complicated nature of the protocol means you're into firewall hell (especially with NAT) and the voice quality of PC based SIP clients remains pretty poor even now (IMHO, obviously). Skype meanwhile has evolved to the point where it "just works" and is capable of better voice quality than my landline on a good day.

SIP didn't die - it's used in enterprise level VOIP applications, inside corporates and big telcos. There's probably a fair chance your international phone traffic is carried by VOIP using something like it. At that level interoperability is pretty important, so adhering to a standard becomes a real necessity and the networking / firewall problems can be resolved by people who know what they're doing and hardware designed to take it.

Meanwhile for the home user who just wanted to talk and didn't care about standards, skype offered an easy to use, good quality and free product which shows no sign of dying out.

Perhaps this is a lesson in "perspective". I was right about skype from a business perspective, in that I don't see corporates rushing to deploy skype across their desktops (I'm sure some do, but I reckon they're the exception rather than the rule). I wasn't thinking like a consumer though, so overall I got it wrong.