"It is very clear that voice communications is moving on to the Internet. In the end, the price that anyone can provide for voice transmission on the Net will trend toward zero"
About this Quote
Whitman’s line is less a prediction than a warning shot: if voice becomes just another data stream, its economics collapse. The sentence starts with managerial certainty ("very clear"), the kind that doesn’t invite debate so much as force a strategic pivot. Then comes the real point: once voice is on the Internet, it stops being a premium product and becomes a feature. A commodity. Something you give away to sell something else.
The subtext is classic platform logic. The Internet doesn’t merely lower costs; it rewrites what people are willing to pay for. When competitors can route calls as packets, your carefully priced minutes look like horse-drawn carriage tolls beside a highway. "Trend toward zero" is the phrase that does the work: it’s not utopian, it’s brutal. It suggests an asymptote driven by scale, competition, and the fact that the marginal cost of an extra call on IP infrastructure is tiny. The market doesn’t reward tradition; it rewards whoever can bundle voice into a broader service stack.
Context matters. In the era when telecom incumbents still treated voice like a crown jewel, Internet telephony (and later Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime) exposed how much of the phone bill was rent, not reality. Whitman, a business operator, is framing an inevitability that investors and executives can act on: if your core product is heading to zero, you’d better own the layer above it - devices, software, identity, customer relationships, advertising, enterprise tools. The prophecy isn’t about technology; it’s about where profit is allowed to live next.
The subtext is classic platform logic. The Internet doesn’t merely lower costs; it rewrites what people are willing to pay for. When competitors can route calls as packets, your carefully priced minutes look like horse-drawn carriage tolls beside a highway. "Trend toward zero" is the phrase that does the work: it’s not utopian, it’s brutal. It suggests an asymptote driven by scale, competition, and the fact that the marginal cost of an extra call on IP infrastructure is tiny. The market doesn’t reward tradition; it rewards whoever can bundle voice into a broader service stack.
Context matters. In the era when telecom incumbents still treated voice like a crown jewel, Internet telephony (and later Skype, WhatsApp, FaceTime) exposed how much of the phone bill was rent, not reality. Whitman, a business operator, is framing an inevitability that investors and executives can act on: if your core product is heading to zero, you’d better own the layer above it - devices, software, identity, customer relationships, advertising, enterprise tools. The prophecy isn’t about technology; it’s about where profit is allowed to live next.
Quote Details
| Topic | Internet |
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