I've been following the conversation in the blogosphere (and in last night’s Calliflower podcast) among the VOIP pundits, arguing whether VOIP is dead or alive. I'm sort of an outsider to all this, since I've only been following VOIP for the past year or so, but it seems to me that the argument isn't so much about VOIP as it is about "coolness". Some of these people have been involved in VOIP since the 1800s or something, and they remember a time when you could start a successful conference or magazine or VC-backed company by simply attaching the name "VOIP" to it. It was cool.

But like so many other ancient technologies, what's cool runs in fads, and I think the real concern among many of the pundits is that they have careers built on an idea that is no longer cool.  Many of them, I bet, secretly envy the people who had "social media" on their resume since 1868, or SEO or <insert your favorite buzzword here>.  VOIP is soooo 2004.

We struggle with this problem in my own product. There are those who argue it should be called VOIP, and that we're missing the buzz by not emphasizing our VOIP capabilities. Then there are others who say it's really part of the successful Microsoft server tradition, and we should call it the "telephony edition" of Small Business Server or Windows Server or something. Other people argue we're really part of the "Unified Communications" revolution, and that we should rename ourselves to be the "small business" or "starter edition" version of OCS.

Fortunately, whether accidentally or deliberately, we don’t think of it in those terms  Who knows, who cares what buzzword we attach? We're just trying to create an innovative solution, and iterate on it as quickly as we can. Yes, sometimes I envy the buzz you get automatically by attaching yourself to the fad technology of the moment-- and heck, maybe I should be more proactive about joining these things -- but at the end of the day our product can’t be dependent on a particular technology (like VOIP or SR).   In some ways, you know you’re mainstream when you’re not cool.