is VOIP innovation?

A lot of articles are being written about VoIP being stagnant or about the lack of innovation in VoIP. I commented earlier on the same issue about how its not the case, but all the noises made me to think hard about the issue and here I would like to put forward a different perspective to the VoIP game itself.

Notice, how in each of the above articles refer to VoIP as some kind of breakthrough and that it needs to be continuously innovating or evolving. Let me just step back for a moment and talk about breakthroughs or radical innovation and incremental innovations. Wikipedia defines radical innovation as launching an entirely novel product or service rather than providing improved products & services along the same lines as currently. Incremental innovation is just a step forward along a technology trajectory and generally involves minor improvements. Generally these improvements would be along two dimensions, efficiency or cost. That is, an incremental innovation would improve the efficiency of existing technology or reduce the cost of using it.

What is VoIP then, a radical or an incremental innovation? You may be tempted to say it is a radical innovation, but I would call it an incremental innovation and here's why. In the evolution of voice, VoIP is just changing the way voice is transmitted between two participants. This is resulting in lowering the cost of communication. Cellular telephony was a radical innovation, in that, it changed the way we communicated. But VoIP is not! Breakthrough or a radical innovation redefines the way we do things, but VoIP has done nothing of that sorts. In fact, VoIP is just the application of an existing technology (packet switching) to another domain (voice). The only reason we are all so excited about VoIP is that it brings communication within reach of masses.

Given that, we should have realistic expectations from VoIP, we need to be aware of what it can and what it can't. We will continue to see incremental innovations in this or allied field, but mind you that is not innovation in VoIP. It is another application of VoIP and we need to clearly distinguish between them.

This article has been written by our VoIP news editor Alok Saboo. Alok is pursuing his PhD in Marketing at the Pennsylvania State University.