Eight months ago I was at a talk given by Marc Andreesen and he was asked about all these anti-spam companies that were getting started. Marc's reply was that people often confuse some basics of business... a stable company should be made up of multiple products and these products are made up of multiple features... all adding value to a customer. He claimed that spam filtering wasn't something to base a company on, since it wasn't even a product, it was a feature that belonged in another product.
With the announcement thatLinksys and Vonage have teamed up to integrate the linksys routers more closely with the vonage service I have started to wonder if telephony services have moved from being a "product" to being a "feature". In the coming year we will see VOIP functionality being deployed in various products including home routers and set-top boxes... with numerous companies pushing to get their VOIP offerings integrated into these access points I wonder when a company like Cisco (which owns linksys) doesn't jump into the fray and just build this "feature" into their product set (assuming no IP issues).
Company, product, feature... there was not doubt in the past that home telephony was a single product that minted money for huge companies, but I really question if in the near future home telephony isn't just a feature that needs to be offered within the context of other products just to be competitive.
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