As we trudge on into the future, we need to question whether the old way of doing things is necessarily the best. Will your future mobile phone, even support voice calling?

Let’s take a look at lessons learned from Skype. eBay purchased Skype a few years ago for an admitted outrageous sum of money, betting on the fact that voice is, in fact, the killer app. Skype was so inviting because the peer-to-peer technology behind it (implemented by the same guy who invented Kazaa), essentially made peer-to-peer voice, free. Exploiting the un-used bandwidth of the participating members, Skype is essentially the give-a-penny-take-a-penny of telecom. You can deliver voice chatting at little or no cost to the network operator.

Somewhere along the way of developing Skype, text chat sprung up alongside the voice chat. Undoubtedly it was seen as “essentially free” and probably helped the early testers tap out messages of “halp!” when their voice connection went down. So why not implement chat indeed?

If you were to re-create Skype from the ground up (and many are trying), you’d make the same choice again to include text chat. What developer in their right mind could leave out text chat? Regardless of how well the voice connection worked, reviewers would most definitely grumble if they couldn’t send back and forth their smilies or short notes.

What this really points to is the fact that voice is not the killer app.*

If you look at my desk, and the amount of time I interact with all the items on it, my PC wins without contest. A far distant second to my PC is the ancient sound wave reproduction device sitting to the left, my telephone. My most-used applications are my email client, my web browser, and then a host of office productivity applications. I only use the phone begrudgingly to attend meetings and receive calls from the lobby about guests that have arrived. If my phone died, I wouldn’t rush facilities to replace it.

You could point out that my job is more oriented towards computer work, if I were a salesman my priorities would be a little different. The telephone would likely be my primary tool because my job would be to communicate and persuade via a synchronous, nuanced, high-context communication channel.

Another objection might point to a multitude of other professions where computer use is negligible or non-existent. Bricklayers, glass-cutters, day-care operators, waitresses, bus drivers and dry cleaners probably could survive quite happily with no computer at all. I on the other hand never need to use a shovel, flashlight, cash register or hockey stick in in the normal course of my work.

And in these exceptions, we see the pattern emerging:

* depending on the needs of the situation, each application has a collection of “best” tools.

As we teeter on the edge of complete cellular saturation, and gaze in astonishment when mobile searches skyrocket for iPhone users, now is the time to ask ourselves,

“is voice really what I want from my phone? don’t I really just want everything in my pocket?”

Just because voice was the initial application of cellular technology does not mean we necessarily should perpetuate the practice of transmitting the sonic vibrations of air passing between two vibrating pieces of meat. Voice is an archaic technology sprung from the biological constraints of our evolution.

I mentioned in a presentation that the current mobile experience “was crap”, and someone challenged me, asking if I thought the iPhone was crap. They asserted it was not crap, because it had displaced 15 to 20 minutes of browsing in the morning they would have normally needed to boot their computer for.

Initially I wanted to persist with my statement that mobile was indeed crap, but the decision was no longer mine to make. He had already decided that for those 15 to twenty minutes, his iPhone was the best tool for the job.

From a product and strategy management perspective, this reinforces the notion that we must always ask why and drive further to the roots. If you’re in the cellular business and you focus narrowly on voice, you’ll get smacked in the head when your competitor blows you away because they have been thinking about communication in all its many forms.

BTW, if you want to see this strategy playing out perfectly, check out the DASH GPS/Mobile search/Traffic Device. Global positioning of YOU is not the killer app, it’s really more about whats NEAR you. They figured out if you Google stuff at home and at work, why wouldn’t you Google it in your car?