Skype In, Gizmo Out

So here's Michael Robertson, CEO of SIPphone, (which makes Gizmo Project) talking to Engadget about the acquisition of Skype by eBay:


"eBay buying Skype is great to raise the awareness for VoIP, but both companies have closed directories and APIs that only let people access data on the periphery. Both of their "open-platform" initiatives are highly restrictive and do not promote the best experience for the user.

"The world does not want a closed commerce and communication experience owned by eBay. The world wants a product that can call anyone, anywhere without paying a toll to a gatekeeper. Only time will tell if eBay chooses to truly open Skype up to the world, but I'm not holding my breath."


I find that attitude irritating. The ease of transmission of digital products has paired with the ugly self-indulgent post-modern mindset and spawned this hideous creature - the 21st century cult of entitlement.

Somehow we have arrived at a point where paying for something seems archaic and uncouth. The concept of value (in both the financial and the moral sense) has been totally eroded by moral relativism. What's that you say, person whose goods and services I am taking advantage of? You desire compensation for your efforts? Barbarian! Extortionist!

I mean, come on - the original concept of a toll gate represents this well, although this point seems to have been lost on Mr. Robertson. The road you are traveling on has been built, at enormous expense, by a forward-thinking individual who saw a need (or a gap in the market) and had the drive and initiative to fill it. The construction of a road is a major investment, and it's not unreasonable to charge others to enjoy the fruits of you labours. A farmer is likewise not required to give away his harvest for free, having invested a year of his toils to produce it.

Or, another way, just because Toyota is capable of making cars, they are not obliged to hand them out free to anyone who wants them. They have a right to charge for the goods they are offering, and the free market will determine the value of those goods.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of open-source collaborative projects - I think that Wikipedia, for example, is a fantastic example of human co-operation at its finest, and I love the ways in which information technology facilitates those kinds of projects. Free e-mail is wonderful, too, and my life would be far poorer without it. But I certainly don't regard it as an inalienable right.

If a company (Yahoo!, perhaps) decides that its business model includes offering free services to attract customers, and then generate revenue through advertising and premium services, that's great. If another company (Amazon.com, for example) decides to go the other direction and focus on commercial transactions, that's equally great. But it is each company's right to chose their own path, and it is the free-market consumer's right to decide which model they prefer for which instance.

Obviously Mr. Robertson has some vested interest in trashing Skype, but his suggestion that companies are somehow being unfair by keeping their intellectual property private is offensive. If he believes that services should be free, I suggest that he refrain from drawing a salary - after all, shouldn't his company have free and unrestricted access to his own services?

Lilium inter spinas

There was one highlight of the presentations:


"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world, while unreasonable people persist in adapting the world to themselves.

"Therefore, all progress is made possible by unreasonable people."


It's good to be unreasonable...

Caledon Excursion

So there we were, all assembled at the office on Thursday morning at 7:00am, like so many good little schoolchildren about to embark on a tour with their teachers keeping watch for any misbehaviour.

And then is was off to Caledon, for two days of drunken debauchery! Wait, scratch that. Two days of conferences and team-building exercises!

(Hmm... Not sure that it sounds quite so exciting that way, but anyway...)

An all-too-brief breakfast awaited us (with desperately-needed coffee), and then we plunged straight into the murky and treacherous depths of our strategy conference. In the interests of avoiding boredom-induced psychosis, I'll not give too much account of the various presentations, but suffice to say that they were... long...



After our morning coffee break (by which point we were already running some 30 mins late), our team broke off from the main company so that we could have our private bull (or bull****, if you prefer) session, which consisted of a half-hour presentation stretched out for 90 minutes. No serious dialogue was suggested or encouraged. You are not here to think. You are here to follow vague, ill-informed and badly-conceived plans from your managerial demi-gods, you insolent peon!

(An amusing point from that session, though - as it was also the kick-off of our subsidiary, we had a lot of focus on such grandiose concepts as mission statements and such. I was especially entertained by the slide entitled "Our Vision" - which contained no fewer than four punctuation errors. Perhaps the intended message was that we need corrective lenses?)

As lengthy as our private chat was, we still ended before the rest of the company, and so had a considerably longer lunch, following which we all rejoined for the remainder of the afternoon.

Which kicked off with the same long-winded 90-minute presentation that we'd just been treated to a sneak-preview of...

...and then descended into an hour on the company accounts (which should have taken about 10 mins).

Unfortunately J (my direct boss) seems to be unable to control his inclination to "clarify" other peoples' presentations - which generally involves 20- to 30-minute rambling detours which serve only to add to the confusion. Clarification is achieved later (over a cup of coffee or a beer), by means of a concisely-phrased one-minute summary from someone else.

There were some moments of light relief in his ramblings, however. For the benefit of non-South African readers, I should mention that there is a very common confusion in SA over the words "borrow" and "lend", based on the fact that Afrikaans only has one word ("leen") for both meanings. From an accountant, though, you'd have hoped that this confusion would have been overcome. It was thus highly amusing to hear such things as, "This year we will be able to avoid having to lend money to cover operating costs." And I'm thinking, "Dude, if we're LENDING money to cover our costs, we have some serious friggin' problems!"

(It is one of my other long-standing issues that J (a chartered accountant) is in charge of the IT operations of the company, and takes it upon himself to dictate software development procedures).

We were also treated to some classic business jargon in the description of why the directors had decided to split the company into the data analysis side and the IT services side - basically they want to establish a client/service provider relationship between the two companies, or as they put it, "[We hope to] drive efficiencies out of that relationship."

Begone, foul demons of efficiency! I cast you out!

I know that my mind has a tendency towards dodgy interpretations, but I was still a bit disturbed by this line: "When bedding down our processes, we don't want to push too hard with our strategic thrusts." And this was followed later by a reference to "dipstick consumer health surveys", which are bad enough even when the company in question doesn't happen to be Pfizer...

By the time we got around to "the good stuff" we were long past our scheduled finishing time and everyone was starting to have unclean thoughts about the bar. After the bar was declared open, the evening rapidly deteriorated in terms of stuffy decorum and greatly improved in entertainment value. Especially after Tony jumped behind the bar and started pouring evil shooters.



After everyone was good and liquored up, we headed off to the casino, having been fronted R100 by the company as a starting stake. The blackjack had a table minimum of R50, so I headed off to roulette instead, where you could play with R10 chips. Not being a very keen gambler, I was there for social reasons rather than to lose vast amounts of money.