My youngest son is in New Zealand for a semester abroad program. The long distance & high prices of phone calls lead us to Skype. Thanks to Skype we have now had a video tour of a friend’s home in Auckland (great application of wireless internet & laptop technology), regular interaction with our son, and using “Skype to phone” service (at 2 cents per minute) have been able to talk with B&B owners, tour operators, etc on their normal land line phones to more efficiently plan our trip down for a visit. Every PC is capable of a Skype voice call out of the box. Most laptops, including my new one are capable of a Skype video call out of the box.
Back in the early 90s, when WWW and URL were technical terms… I was a leader of an Intel team that put together the first Internet based video conferencing product (officially known as ProShare 1.8). This work was undertaken to drive demand for newer and faster Intel CPUs. Let me recall a few things from those long ago days…
#1: During Intel’s strategic planning work during the time, I & another engineering leader took on a VP & the company’s current direction in a battle between Internet or ISDN (the telcos digital phone offering at the time) as the future for communications technology. Intel was committed to ISDN along with some big telco partners. We argued hard for why the Internet (packet switching vs circuit switching) was going to be the long term winner… but we were new to this big planning stage & we got creamed in the final debate… I still remember the VP’s comment “the telcos will never let these little ISPs take this valuable market from them”. We got the OK to do a single product, but Intel’s switch to Internet for communications would not happen for years.
#2: Latency… my god have routers gotten better, not to mention the bandwidth of the last mile connections. In the early 90s we did deliver a product that provided a functional, effective video call over a normal business internet connection. But the delay was highly variable & often long both because of the slow speed of the routers, but also to the often indirect paths of connection in an Internet with a much less coherent high speed backbone than what currently exists.
#3: Out of the box… not only did the ProShare product have to provide a camera and headset, but also a full size add in board was required to get the needed performance. There were of course issues with the Windows OS as well because it didn’t understand the urgency required to move real time communications packets around. Expensive and awkward add-ons were required that severely limited the market since you couldn’t talk to anyone unless they had also had made the same purchase.
#4: Web based address books… Skypes connection model & the ability to find other Skype users is light years removed from our thinking. We used personal address books, the notion of a central web registry was never considered… the web was just getting traction on its own at the time.
Hopefully our work was an early baby step forward… compression technology, lots of OS & PC architecture bottlenecks identified, proof of concept, etc… But I’m truly impressed with what has been achieved. If I ever run into Pat again, I’ll have to say “I told you so…” Most likely my grandchildren will view traditional circuit switched phones the same way I viewed my grandmother’s rural hand crank party line phone… something likely created while dinosaurs roamed the planet.