{"id":28,"date":"2007-05-15T10:45:15","date_gmt":"2007-05-15T17:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/briantroy.com\/blog\/2007\/05\/15\/wal-mart-voip-yep-it-is-a-commodity\/"},"modified":"2007-05-15T10:45:15","modified_gmt":"2007-05-15T17:45:15","slug":"wal-mart-voip-yep-it-is-a-commodity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/2007\/05\/15\/wal-mart-voip-yep-it-is-a-commodity\/","title":{"rendered":"Wal-Mart VoIP &#8211; Yep, it is a commodity."},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\" title=\"MSNBC\">MSNBC<\/a> article yesterday <a href=\"http:\/\/www.msnbc.msn.com\/id\/18654310\/\" title=\"MSNBC Article\">details a new alliance between Wal-Mart and Skype<\/a>.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The dedicated <a href=\"http:\/\/www.skype.com\" title=\"Skype\">Skype<\/a> section will feature handsets, headsets and webcams designed to work with Skype, a provider of free and very cheap long-distance calls, including to phone numbers abroad. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.walmart.com\" title=\"Wal-Mart\">Wal-Mart<\/a> will also sell the first prepaid cards for Skype calls to be sold in this country, the companies were announcing Monday.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>This development highlights a dynamic we&#8217;ve discussed earlier &#8211; the commoditization of voice communications &#8211; or Phase 1 of the 3 part adoption pattern.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I can think of no clearer indication that the current trend in VoIP adoption is cost avoidance (commoditization) driven than to see America&#8217;s pre-eminent  discount retailer dedicate a section of the lucrative electronics section to Skype gear.<\/p>\n<p>It is clear that Skype now sees the voice communication session (heretofore know as &#8220;phone call&#8221;) as a loss-leader. Revenue is generated via the sale of licensed gear associated with having those communications sessions. It is unclear if this is a winning strategy, but the pairing with Wal-Mart indicates that there will be significant volume of sales.<\/p>\n<p>It will be interesting to see the reaction of the legacy telecoms (Verizon, at&amp;t, etal) and the emerging VoIP proivders (Vonage, Broadvoice, etcal) to this development.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An MSNBC article yesterday details a new alliance between Wal-Mart and Skype. The dedicated Skype section will feature handsets, headsets and webcams designed to work with Skype, a provider of free and very cheap long-distance calls, including to phone numbers abroad. Wal-Mart will also sell the first prepaid cards for Skype calls to be sold&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/2007\/05\/15\/wal-mart-voip-yep-it-is-a-commodity\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Wal-Mart VoIP &#8211; Yep, it is a commodity.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31,33],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogarchive.briantroy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}