I have been rebuked by two people already for being polite today – Matt Marshall and Rafat Ali – both say I was being too nice. I have a perfect excuse. I have food poisoning, cold and was ebullient over closing yet another stellar issue of Business 2.0. And at the risk of shocking people more, I am going to not be mean and actually congratulate folks over at Vonage for hitting the million customer mark. Others had different opinions – like this and this. As they say, the first million is the hardest.
It still doesn’t ensure a great IPO, or a great exit via sale to some greater fool. And it also doesn’t mean that cable companies are not going to eat their lunch and dinner. Or that upstarts like soon to be born YAVS (yet another voip service for acronym-challenged) IGOnet or Adcalls (oh boy this reminds me of 1999) are going to go away. But lets be nice, and applaud Jeffrey and his team for being the first million VoIP customer company. Like @Home, they made this market happen – and that in my books is pretty darn good. (I am sticking to this line, unless Skype issues a clean, and easy to understand press release!) Oh, so all of you who want to take a swing at me for being nice, well this is your last chance 😉
Vonage is certainly not the first million VoIP company. Yahoo broadband had over 4 million subscribers in Japan based on an old June 2004 number.
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=64149&table_number=1&page_number=&site=
It might be the first in the US, but it’s a big planet… 🙂
I agree, this needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Vonage is definitely coming up and is making good progress in the
home broadband market , but frankly the way they run their company and the resources theuy use to achieve these numbers leaves something to be desired.
i hope vonage can overcome after the issues w/ verizon and restore the great high speed internet name! http://afforadablet1.com