There is an old maxim in the fashion business that says that everything comes back into style eventually. (I’ll prove it — I never thought I’d be wearing wide-bottom jeans again, but here we are.)
This same principle can be applied to technology. Who would have thought that mainframes would make a comeback? Who would have thought that the richness of more traditional desktop client-server applications (as opposed to the relatively sparser GUI’s of web-based applications) would come back into vogue?
And so it is with voice technologies. When I read about the latest Voice over IM development (for example, this one, and this one here, and of course this one), I can’t help but think about the early days of VoIP. Remember when the only way to use VoIP was on your PC ““ before Vonage or the other providers brought VoIP to your telephone? I came across this neat article on the history of VoIP as I was reminiscing that provides a good description of the early days.
So it looks like VoIP has advanced to the point where its making a comback on the PC…? Weird.