If Apple allows interoperability, the industry must follow
Matt Hamblen of Computer World wrote about Steve Jobs’ lofty goals for the iPhone 4′s video conferencing feature “FaceTime” to become an open standard. Open standards are always welcome, but the industry generally looks at these invitations with suspicion and for good reason. Just because a standard is “open” doesn’t mean it is royalty free.
However, and despite being a newcomer, Apple has made video conferencing more relevant than ever because they have passed some magical threshold of usability and market share. It’s one thing to have a dominant market share in a few hundred thousand executive board rooms, or even millions of desktop/notebook computers which may or may not have good webcams set up, but it’s another to have tens of millions of fully functional and usable mobile video conferencing end-points even if it’s limited to Wi-Fi wireless Ethernet range. So if Apple allows interoperability, even if it comes with a price tag, it’s hard for me to imagine the rest of the video conferencing industry to refuse.
I am actually disappointed in Skype for not making this happen first. While I applaud Apple for this accomplishment. I always thought Skype would have owned the industry for being there early and gaining the easy of use market.
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Skype actually has a lot of interoperability with the big video conferencing manufacturers, at least from an audio front. I think there are multiplexers that can make it interoperate as well.
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