Michael Urlocker had an interesting comment on my holiday weekend posting. He suggests that Skype is the competition for phone service and then asks if Skype is disruptive or destructive.
It is instructive to go back 25 years, when the post office was seen as competition by the telecom industry. After all, people made phone calls for Mother’s Day as a substitute for sending cards. The new telecopier capability, now called fax, was seen as the ultimate substitute for mail.
Telecom services are facing other behavioural shifts as a new generation communicates with a range of tools that simply didn’t exist before.
Sharing music or other files, instant messaging (with or without voice), mobility: These are all parts of the multi-disciplinary analysis to sort out the sources of competition over the next few years.