As Reuters reports, Skype “is reaching for the American consumer mainstream by selling its telephone kits in RadioShack stores.”
Beginning Monday, RadioShack will also have a special kiosk to feature Skype products, including a new Motorola headset that uses short-range wireless Bluetooth technology to make calls via Skype, priced at $100. It will sell a $40 headset from Logitech and a $129 cordless phone from Linksys, a unit of Cisco Systems. The RadioShack kiosk will feature Skype starter kits for $5 with a simple earpiece/microphone, software and 30 minutes of free Skype calling time to any number in the world. Sales clerks will offer training videos and software to customers [More details on product availability can be found here].
Om Malik raises concerns about possible backlash from buyers when they face call quality problems, which he says he’s been experiencing himself. More ominous for Skype is Om’s comment that:
In recent conversations with CEOs of big telecoms, the message was pretty clear: Skype is going to be sleeping with the fishes soon. I have no reason to doubt the giants, because they protect their turfs pretty aggressively. Susan Crawford put it pretty aptly when she wrote, “I don’t think the fight over ‘network neutrality’ is one we’re going to win.”
Recent comments by SBC CEO Ed Whitacre underscore Om’s and Susan’s concerns.
Though it strikes me as pretty unlikely, there may be a scenario in which Skype’s effort to go mainstream—and potentially even any quality problems its users faced—could help it and other web-based service providers by increasing public awareness of the network neutrality issue and garnering support for the “open access” side of the debate.
In this scenario, call quality problems experienced by Skype users could potentially be used to make the case for network neutrality by blaming these problems on pipe-owners seeking to limit customer choice and unfairly hobble competitors. This seems a long shot given the PR muscle of the RBOCs and the need for users to consider broader issues rather than simply get turned off to Skype and pass on bad reviews to their friends and family. And, let’s face it, the RBOCs have been through this kind of situation in various forms for decades (i.e., competitors deliver service using RBOC networks and are at least partly dependent on the RBOCs for some elements of their service quality).
But in the age of blogs and electronic word of mouth, PR muscle isn’t as overwhelming an advantage as it used to be (though control of the pipes may remain so). And, as Sony’s recent debacle suggests, if clumsily executed in the face of expanding consumer outrage, a corporate PR defense can actually make things worse. That being said, it seems pipe-owners would not be as obviously vulnerable to this backfire affect as Sony was when it put users’ computers at risk.
Regardless of how it impacts Skype’s market prospects, the company’s deal with RadioShack could increase the visibility of the “network neutrality” issue, which would be a timely development, since Congress is considering new legislation to address this and related issues.
Mitch Shapiro at 2:54 PM|Comments(0)
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