Hi All,
I face some problems when I try to introduce Asterisk to my customers / friends.
They are not convince as they are currently using Skype and asking me what is/are the different between this two.
Does anyone in the community can provide such a comparison chart?
What's your opinion ?
It comes down to one thing in the final analysis: open versus closed (proprietary) models.
It's no big secret that the "Skype way" is a lot like the "Microsoft way" in that they want everyone using their proprietary system, because to the degree they "own" the market they can totally dictate to their customers what is going to be done, how much it's going to cost, etc.
Beyond that, what kind of records do they keep internally of their users' behavior? What kinds of other things on their users' machines do they track? Of course the answer is "No one knows," because it's all closed and secret. They even keep secret the methods they use to allow peers to find one another. I'm sure you know that Kazaa users were recently surprised to learn, as it came out in court over in Europe, that centralized records have been kept of everyone's Kazaa usage from the get-go. Nice to know in case the RIAA ever comes looking for people. What kinds of similar things does Skype do? No one knows.
Finally, when you go the open route you have choice. If I don't like my softphone for whatever reason, there are a dozen others to choose from. If my ITSP has service problems, or customer service problems, then it's a trivial task for me to sign up with another one. I can also shop rates.
We learned in the legacy telephone world how bad monopolies are when it comes to price, features, innovation, etc. Why would consumers then move to a similar model when they migrate to VoIP? Answer: slick marketing on Skype's part, as well as herd mindset.
There are many reasons to stay clear of Skype.
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