Believe the skype 18 Apr 05

They’re definitely on to something. If I was Vonage I’d be worried.

Alan 18 Apr 05

Started using it last week. Great set up and pretty easy to use. Need to wait till they set up in Ireland though to establish a local number. Closest I can get is a UK number.

Once that happens , sunny beach office here I come!

Megan 18 Apr 05

My firm’s experience with Skype is that you pretty much get what you pay for: it’s a great service…when it works. We use it for conferencing between our LA and Milwaukee offices, and also with some subcontractors in Denver.

You haven’t appreciated a real landline until you’re shouting repeatedly and loudly into a headset, “Can you hear me???”, and either hearing a response or not, sometimes as much as 5 seconds later.

On the other hand, when it works, it’s great for conferencing and the integrated instant messaging makes it easy to send references to urls as the discussion progresses.

Not sure I’d be ready to trust my phone message with the service quite yet…

wow 18 Apr 05

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=749&e=1&u=/ap/20050418/ap_on_bi_ge/adobe_macromedia&sid=84439559

Dan Boland 18 Apr 05

Wow, indeed. Adobe is quickly becoming the Microsoft of media (though without many of the sharky manuevers M$ is known for). I’m not sure how I feel about it.

Megan 18 Apr 05

This swerves off the road, topic-wise, but I’ll byte. ;)

Personally, this merger concerns me quite a lot. Programs like Fireworks that our firm uses in preference to Photoshop (for web work, at least) would probably be in jeopardy.

Also, competition between the firms is one of the things that drives innovation and incremental increases in performance, etc. Without the need to keep innovating and outperforming, what is going to keep their product lines fresh? Who will be their rivals?

Open Source? As much as I love the idea of open source, I haven’t seen great interface development for most open source products, and that’s one of the advantages that Adobe and MM have over free graphics editing programs available online.

Apple? Well, they’ve got great interface developers and could probably create some additional product lines to match up against all Adobe products, but for those of us on PCs, we’re SOL…

Any other thoughts?

Dan Boland 18 Apr 05

Sorry, Matt. Blame wow.

Megan: I never really thought of Adobe and Macromedia (or at least Creative Suite and Studio) being in direct competition with each other, with the exception of GoLive vs. Dreamweaver (though it’s really no contest, in my opinion). I always thought of Adobe as desktop publishing and Macromedia as web publishing.

But I’m starting to feel trepidation about this deal, particularly in light of the massive discussion we had regarding Adobe Activation. What will keep prices down? I remember being worried when the rise of InDesign gave Adobe a stranglehold on desktop publishing… now this?

sloan 18 Apr 05

The advantage of Skype over land lines is that you can access your “phone” from anywhere. The only thing holding me back for replacing my landline right now is my contract for DSL and lack of support for OS X on the USB phones. By the time my contract is up it should be worked out though. I will love it when all telephone services is IP based so my cell phone is simply one of many interfaces to my “phone”.

Brian Breslin 18 Apr 05

i’m an active user of vonage, and one thing i’ve noticed, the fax line they gave me stinks! I’ve lost at least 5 or 6 faxes due to transmission errors in the last 4 months (luckily the senders resent them).
Skype has promise once more and more people use it. AOL should buy skype and integrate it into AIM. Then everyone I know would be using it. As is, most people i know haven’t even installed skype yet.

Dan Boland 18 Apr 05

How long before M$ buys Skype? ;D

Sam 18 Apr 05

I use Skype quite a bit actually, and I was *this* close to signing up for SkypeIn. But thinking about it, it’s basically a softphone thats mobile, but obviously still tied to a computer. If only there was a way to have a truly mobile phone number with voicemail….

*looks at cellphone in hand.*

… I see the incentive for small businesses to do this (I’m sure you would save a lot of money), but what’s the incentive for a individual over relying on just a cell phone?

Kelly 18 Apr 05

I’ve been looking at this pretty hard recently, now that the Cingular/AT&T merger is showing signs in my cell phone bars, namely less bars now. I’m a freelancer that relies on my mobile, and have no landline. I realize this is a dicey situation to take, but the reliablity I got from AT&T was my main push to do it.

Skype looks to offer an incredibly great service for little out of pocket, which is a big selling point for someone like me. But as Megan writes above, I’m concerned with adding another communication tool whose reliability is still being honed.

I’ll wait it out a bit…

Brian Breslin 18 Apr 05

What SkypeIN needs is to have it forward to your cell phone if you don’t answer in X rings. My vonage phone does this (as to tons of other regular or IP phones, i’m sure), and it is useful, since I am out of the office alot.

SkypeIN requires them to build up infrastructure that regular skype did not. Since they need to store the voicemail, and patch into regular phonelines more (same way skypeOut does). I do see TONS of potential though, how to capitalize on it is the question. Whomever comes up with a palm version, or some killer app to use w/skype, let me know, I want in on it. :-)