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The last few days has brought a swirl of news surrounding the super uber do everything greatness of the next generation in telephones - media phones. And I’m not buying it.
Why?
I don’t think there is a need for them. Thus I don’t think they’re going to sell.
When you look at the dominant vertical markets for desktop telephones only the residential market seems like a place where these media phones might find a home. But even at that it will be viewed as more toy then anything else.
I can’t see an enterprise dropping these on everyone’s desks. I can’t see an SMB wanting them either. Ditto for the gov/ed sectors. Sure media phones are cool, but how does cool help the person save money or drive revenues?
It doesn’t.
Plus this might be the worse time to release higher price feature rich endpoints. In case folks have forgotten customers aren’t exactly being generous with their capital outlay. A trend that won’t soon see a reversal.
Perhaps I’m completely wrong here. The analysts think this a multi-billion dollar opportunity.
But none of that will be my money because I’m not buying it.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
I don’t get it either. These phones are really cool in a demo, but most of my customers say, “I’ve got a computer right next to the phone and an iPhone on my belt. Why do I need to spend $800 on a desk phone?” In fact, I’m hearing a lot of people start to wonder if the desk phone is becoming irrelevant altogether in favor or softphones and mobile devices.
@ Sean
Good point about desktop phones becoming irrelevant. While I hope it doesn’t happen soon (as that’s how I pay the bills) at some point people will start reducing redundant devices.
To be honest I am very close to moving towards eliminating both my home and business computers/VoIP phones in favor of a robust laptop that has a softclient/headset. While I don’t think this is ideal for every business user, I think you’ll start to see more people “take their connection” with them.
It comes down to features. I also see no reason for a phone like this in the home. I DO however see a need for VoIP providers to offer PBX like features to home users. This can be achieved with a simple ATA at the customer prem.
I really think that the future of VoIP phones in a home environment is more of a backup. If for some reason my cell dies or I lose it, at least I have my voip backup at home.
Another place where VoIP in the home could succeed is if my cell phone would auto sense when I was by my home router, and jump off the cell network and onto my VoIP.
Having done several large scale roll outs all over the world we clearly see the tendency that business users simply want a desk phone offering them constant and predictable high quality audio. All value added stuff is shifted to the desktop (corporate directory, video, chat, call control, notifications, …). At least in Europe, people don’t like soft phones because of the unpredictable quality (ever tried opening a 25M Word document during a phone call ?), so I don’t think the desk phone will disappear in the near future. The big advantage of off-loading the added value to a desktop application (or iPhone or Android) is that this (inexpensive) software evolves over time, avoiding that you have to re-invest in new hardware phones.
TJ Stamm: “Another place where VoIP in the home could succeed is if my cell phone would auto sense when I was by my home router, and jump off the cell network and onto my VoIP.”
Great idea.
We’ve been doing it with Asterisk and Bluetooth for several years. It’s called proximity detection. And an iPhone is almost perfect.
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