tech.mchiu.com

Skype Vs. Yahoo

Kevin Delaney at skypejournal has an interesting piece comparing Skype vs. the new and improved Yahoo! IM with voice.

Although I agree on some points, for the most part, I tend to disagree with his remarks, which I will go through point-by-point:

Why Yahoo has an edge:

They have the North American market secured, while Skype is still struggling to enter Canada and fully bloom in the USA

Not sure about Canada, but if Skype is struggling to fully bloom in the US, I am wondering how it caught the attention of so many companies last year that were all fighting to buy it? Now that it is owned by eBay, doesn't that give Skype a lot more exposure in the US?

Yahoo Voice uses SIP , a standard protocol, as opposed to Skype's closed one.

This is something I totally agree with, and the main reason why I don't like using Skype. Of course, over here in the US, everyone I know that is accessible by VoIP pretty much uses Skype, but I do also have an account on Gizmo that I prefer to use, but only have 1 friend that was adventurous enough to use it with me.

They've licensed the GIPS codec for voice transport

I'm not sure how this gives Yahoo an edge since Skype also licenses the GIPS codec. From the Global IP Sound website's "Backgrounder" :

Who Our Customers Are

Global IP Sound works with leading VoIP application developers and equipment providers to deliver Internet communications products to give home and business users unmatched voice quality. GIPS-enhanced products in distribution today or going to market in the near future include:

- Skype – GIPS supplies all the voice-processing technology in the Skype peer-to-peer softphone, which has had more than 18 million downloads and has garnered numerous accolades for its excellent voice quality. Two Skype partners, Plantronics and Siemens, will also distribute GIPS-enhanced Skype.

They have the power to advertise it on the #1 Most Visited site in the world.

Being advertised on eBay isn't too bad either.

Some of their prices beat Skype's While this may be true, at the end of the day, I don't think price will really matter versus QoS, feature set, and maybe a few other factors.

Why Skype is still better:

Skype has the European market. Yahoo clearly mentions on the bottom of their information page : "Intended for use by U.S. residents only.", leaving Canada and the rest of the world in the dust.

I am not sure why having the European market necessarily makes Skype better? Yahoo is pretty much a multinational company, so it will only be a matter of time before Yahoo can expand into Canada and the rest of the world. Arguably, Skype might already be there, so it will be difficult for Yahoo or any other contender to break in, however, with Yahoo Auctions taking out eBay in many Asian countries, it's not entirely impossible either.

They are fully P2P and encrypted. Nobody's listening, while Yahoo will submit under the pressure of big brother to eavesdrop.

I am not sure how being P2P is an advantage? The other reason why I switched over to Gizmo was because it is not a Peer-to-Peer app, but rather a Point-to-Point solution. The problem with Skype being a P2P app, isn't so much that it's P2P, which does solve some of the QoS issues, but moreso because you don't have a choice of how much, if any, of your bandwidth you would like to allocate for use by Skype. Skype works by selecting certain computers to act as "supernodes" where much of the traffic flows through these computers, thereby reducing the speed of the network and those PCs down to a crawl.

I'm not sure of Yahoo's encryption schemes, if they have any, but submitting under pressure of big bro isn't a situation that will only be unique to Yahoo. Just about any VoIP provider will have to face this at some point, including Skype. And in the end, if eBay wants to keep it's business, it probably will be under a lot of pressure to cave in to the government.

As much as they like to think it, Yahoo does not own the IM world and doesn't have nearly the amount of IM users that Skype has. I agree. And neither IM client has nearly the amount of IM users as AIM.

No ads, no bloat and nothing you don't want.

I agree here too... sort of... There are no ads with Skype, which is definitely a good thing, and I hope that ebay doesn't get any bright ideas of adding contextual ads to IM chats on Skype... as for bloat, well... yes and no... for the most part, Skype runs pretty fast, but as I mentioned before, it can feel like bloat if you are turned into a supernode.

Calling is the central focus of Skype, while Voice is now a "feature" of YIM.

I don't see how this makes Skype better? In which way are you looking at it? To me, voice *IS* a feature for any app. While working at HearMe, the original HearMe voice client was just a feature that was added to the Mplayer.com website so that players could speak to one another via voice, instead of text. HearMe later decided to sell off the Mplayer.com side, and what was left was a company purely focused on voice. Later, LipStream, Firetalk, and finally HearMe, all fell over. The only survivor was really Net2Phone that got bought out by AT&T. Skype got bought out by eBay, so it should be safe, but don't kid yourself... if Skype were only a voice company, how long could it actually last by providing a free client software, and competing against the long-distance telcos on cheaper international calls?

It's fully cross-platform.

This is true. I just wished that a PalmOS version would come out so I could use it on a Treo... :D

Anyway... just felt like giving back my remarks. What does everyone else think?