Steve’s Tech Journal

Back in June, Jeff Pulver got a discussion going on SIP and Skype, which focused on whether the SIP community could learn some lessons from Skype’s success and roll-out an equally viral compelling product. Yesterday Jeff observed that the discussion in the comment area has picked up again, and invited more people to jump in.

So I did, and since I took the trouble to do so I thought I’d post my thoughts here, properly hyperlinked since the comment fields don’t support linking too well. Of course, you can always go read it in it’s original form … Here’s what I had to say:

We’ve got a naming problem and that’s for sure.

The SIP acronym no longer distinguishes between the protocol, the end user software or device, and the network service. We’ve confused the consumer.

To Geoff’s point, you can in fact walk into a Walmart and get a SIP phone, it’s called Vonage.
Note that it’s not called a SIP phone, it’s called a VoIP phone adaptor.

Skype rolled the service, the network, and the software into a seamless whole that just works. When someone says Skype you know what they mean.

When someone says “call me on SIP”, you’ve got no clue what they mean. I mean, hell, I’m embaressed to say I haven’t even set up a SIP URI for myself yet — it’s on my todo list to config into my home Asterisk server, but I just haven’t had the time to sort it out and no-one is really asking me for it so that they can make calls to me.

To ramble just a bit further, I think we in technology often understand the value of a clean name (or brand, lets say). Having done the tech side of a web / voice dating company for years now, I’ve gotten to know some top-notch brand people and I have learned to respect them.

Let’s look at the four names from a consumer perspective:

Skype - not an acronym, means nothing innately, had been branded to be equated with free high quality internet calling
SIP - stands for Session Initiaion Protocol. Sound’s complicated. Hopelessly muddled and overloaded term. Time to reboot. (Other than to continue to use it for it’s original purpose, the name on the RFC). Starting to call the soft and hard phones “SIP phones” was a big marketing mistake. I mean, even if you don’t explain the acronym I would venture the term “sip” is inherently confused with foamy pink cocktails or some such. Bad brand.
Gizmo — sorry to pick on this, but gizmo sounds too geeky and cheap. The brand association here does not connote easy to use, straightforward. It connotes complicated, clever technology.
Free World Dialup — this is much better, I can get a sense of what it is — and Jeff I’m glad to see the “telephony by geeks for geeks” message has been replaced, I thought that it was limiting.

You know, there was a great article on slashdot last month about the fact that the Linux community is really bad at naming things. I would agree, here’s an excerpt “This article at XYZ Computing takes a look at Linux’s strange naming practices. When compared to their Window’s equivalents, the names of many Linux programs are difficult to recognize and even tougher to remember. This may seem like splitting hairs, but it is actually an important usability issue.”

I would submit this has spilled over into our SIP community, which after all has been by and large built by the technologists.

OK, enough on this topic, I’m likely preaching to the choir anyway…