Just what the world needs more of

Usually right before the market ends for a product, it seems to achieve perfection.  Take a simple DVD player, they’re now very slick, small and thin, have all the right plugs for all assortments of audio/video, they’ve improved the output quality with Blu-ray, they’ve tried to continue the innovation by incorporating the new newness like Pandora and Netflix and they’re dirt cheap to boot.  The only problem – I don’t watch DVD’s anymore.

This problem confronts today’s enterprise PBX’s. The phones are indeed slick, the feature set enormous, the quality of calls higher and they seem to play well with their Internet friends. The only problem – I don’t make many phone calls period much less with my enterprise phone.

The fact that I can now get a hosted PBX or Unified Communications doesn’t really change my mindset. I don’t use a fixed line telephone all that much and thus I really don’t need someone to further improve on something I already don’t want to use. But this doesn’t seem to stop people from trying to convince me otherwise.

Everything is about mobile, isn’t it. This has passed by our VoIP friends who’ve taken to convincing me that I shouldn’t use the telephony that’s part of my service provider and native to the iPhone but to instead use their application.  Believe it or not there are more than 1,000 VoIP applications on the iTunes app store today. Really? Yes.

Nearly all of these applications seem to offer effectively the same thing, come join our group, make free calls within your group, chat, share something, see their status and you can also make really cheap phone calls outside your group by putting some $$$ on your account.

Do we really need 1,000 of these?