This Week in Backspin: VoIP for Soccer Moms

In Backspin this week I discuss the future of Vonage (which we have a separate thread for)  as well as the issue of solving VoIP service problems particularly if you aren’t a tech geek. In this blog entry I want to discuss product complexity and why VoIP’s promise might never appear.

Underlying the issue of whether VoIP can succeedd is the problem that arises simply because communications products have become so complex. Look at the manual that comes with your cell phone — if it is a reasonably recent product it will have a roster of features that makes a complete set up a major ordeal. And look at what’s coming up: Cell phones with GPS, really good cameras, video and MP3 playback … it seems to be an endless track of feature bloat.

And that’s just cell phones! PCs, whether they be Windows or Macs, are even more complex.

So, what of my favorite test pilots for product useability, the soccer mom? This isn’t meant to disparage soccer moms but rather uphold them as an iconic, idealized consumer. I contend that if your product can’t be efficiently and effectively adopted by this group of young, active, time-pressured consumers then you aren’t really in the consumer market.

If this group doesn’t use your product in depth and has to struggle to set it up and is in effect incapable of easily diagnosing problems then you have failed if they are your market. You might be in the business market, the geek market, or whatever but you are no in the consumer market.

Now you might argue that if the price is right and a majority of consumers are satisfied with the feature set they can use then as product vendor you are golden. But remember that problem solving issue? That where these products fail miserably.

We’ve seen this issue with every operating system of any commercial consequence and with every home use targetted WAN router and wireless access point device. Now we’re seeing it with VoIP.

But VoIP is different than many other new technology products: It replaces an existing service that is well understood and usable with minimum training by almost everyone.

Although I am thinking mainly of consumer-grade VoIP I have recently had a couple of letters from Backspin readers relating horror stories with commercial VoIP installations by well-known vendors. I starting to wonder if VoIP is not measuring up to the hype is both commercial and consumer markets.digression>

Consumer grade VoIP has got to become as reliable and robust as the Plain Old Telephone Service and do so in short order if it is to succeed. The consequence of not doing so will be that VoIP will become yet another technology that could have changed everything but didn’t.