Cisco complains to the EU about Microsoft/Skype deal

Fair Do's Cisco

I can see their point TBH. As soon as M$ got their grubby mitts on Skype, the Skype for Asterisk project at Digium went out the window (excuse the pun), We don't need a replay of "Browser wars" with video & voice chat (and IM).

If Google can buy and open source WebM, lets see if this is Microsofts equivalent. Buying and open sourcing Skype... not holding my breath...

money, money, money, money....

I bet that if MS would move some towards Cisco then everything will be water under the bridge, eh?

Amazing how people hold the Digium issue against MS suddenly. Yes; I cannot understand why you don't want a 3rd party to sell your intellectual property to its own customers while it got access to the source for /free/ in the first place. Especially put within the context that you (the current owner) are /also/ trying to make an income out of it.

Sure; whatever Digium gave away for free could be missed. Key issue here is that their main interest wasn't with that but with the selling stuff.

Realize that in the end businesses thrive on revenue and sales. NOT by good impressions alone.

Further more; I think its absurd to start wondering if MS is going to "kill" Skype. People asked the same question when MS took over Hotmail and look at it today; still available for free, still without demans to sign away your freedom ("we can use the e-mails global contents for ...") and still free of charge without getting invaded with a shitload of ads.

I'm not sure I get what cisco are worried about

So here's a thing.. Skype right now is pretty much aimed at the consumer market. Cisco dont play in this area so much. Any idiot can tell you that MSFT bought Skype to enhance the Lync and Lync online capabilities to provide hosted PBX, PSTN breakout in the cloud type services. In order to do this they will need to build a SIP gateway to connect to the Lync platform. Job done. This suggests to me that Cisco are crapping themselves that they are majorly worried about some heavy competition in the UC market. I would be too. It's where they make a major part of their revenue.. but come on, Cisco bleating on about open standards.. hmm pot, kettle....

Skype is just horrible. It's a lot more expensive than SIP, it's a lot slower and buggy than other VOIP programs, the video quality is ATROCIOUS! The software has no exit in it's file menu, only sign out. It's made by those nordics whose only real success so far was Kazaa. Anyone remember the huge fail that was Joost?

The sooner this pile of crap dies the better.

Forgot to mention how ridiculous the audio is: laggy and fuzzy. Lovely way to let people know you can't afford/ be bothered to use a professional VOIP solution.

Why does anyone use it?

I have never understood why anyone would saddle themselves with skype...

Think back a few years, when BT was the only game in town and you couldn't just buy a phone or modem, you had to get one that was BT approved or rent the phone from BT themselves.

Now look at skype, you can't just use any client with it, you have to use a skype approved client (and as someone else has noted, asterisk was recently taken off that list)... They also work very hard to clamp down on anyone trying to reverse engineer the protocol.

You have a lot of users, locked in to a wannabe monopoly telco, sure it might be free to make calls to other skype users now but how long will that last? The more people who depend on it for day to day communication, the more pain those users will feel moving to something else so a lot wouldn't move and just pay up.

The quality is highly variable, and often extremely bad... I have had people call me from skype before and could barely hear what they were saying.

Similarly the costs to make calls outside of the skype network is very high, and you only have one provider to choose from. Welcome back to the days of monopoly telcos.

There are many SIP providers out there who provide cheaper calls and far superior service, which can be used from any device that supports the SIP standard.

People have fought for years to not be locked in to a single provider, we now have 4 mobile operators to choose from, many areas have both virgin and bt, and bt are forced to offer their lines on a wholesale basis so third parties can resell them. Skype is a huge step back, and yet people don't seem to realise this and are fooled by the bait.

Poetic Justice

Cisco's had this coming for a long time. Even when their hardware "supports" open standards it has always been done half-heatedly at best. Broken features, inexplicable failures, etc. OSPF anyone? Ever tried to set up SIP on a Cisco phone or VIOP gateway? I could go on. The fact that they are wining about open standards shows just how low they've sunk. I hate to say it, as I made my living working with their products for many years, but Cisco is getting what they deserve.

Now that I am in a position to make such decisions I won't even consider a product that requires vendor lock in. This has meant many a late night in the console configuring arcane scripts and building some really odd cron jobs, but the quality and reliability of services and products from companies that know you can easily switch to another provider/manufacturer has been well worth the effort.

Mines the one with the expired (and likely never to be renewed) CCNA in the pocket.