October 15th, 2007
Yea, let's let Skype live, shall we?
My recent Should Skype and Vonage Adapt or Die? post was a commentary on a death wish expressed to these providers by Network World columnist Mark Gibbs.
I’ve been expecting a forthright defense of 
Skype from the independent but still Skype-enthusiast Skype Journal team. Today we have just that from the clued-in Phil Wolff, in the form of his post, Why Skype and Vonage Must Live.
While Phil doesn’t really get around to Vonage, here’s the core of Phil’s argument for Skype:
Like Microsoft, Skype opened up to third parties by publishing protocols. You can write your own voice mail client in an hour. Skype has APIs for presence, IM, voice and video calls, voice messaging, billing, and call routing. Skype has a budding developer community, mashup contests and free wrappers and other tools for programmers. Skype even publishes a high-level working API roadmap. It’s still early, Skype’s not done. And Skype is far from closed, Mark.
Phil’s right. Skype’s more open than you think, Mark, and deserves to be around for quite some time.
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
