Reineccius’ whole life is about creating the perception of his great intelligence and success. But he’s all show and not much go — everything in his life is a dissertation of “what might have been.” The ultimate victim. His bio will tell you he graduated Berkeley; he dropped out. He will tell you, quietly, that he was “in the CIA but then didn’t want to do it anymore because we (the US) suck.” Yeah, right.

Real pioneers find ways around problems, even big ones, instead of using problems as a way to explain away failures and life as an almost-ran wannabe.

Quicknet failed for a lot of reasons – most of which are not worth talking about. Startups need a good product, the right market channels, enough cash to get to the end of the runway, strong execution, and a lot of luck… and we didn’t have the magic combination of all that to make it. Few companies do – most fail. Skype got the right combination – including the massive dose of luck. It’s a crying shame – it would have changed the world (and I’d be substantially more wealthy as well).

These conversations and hand-wringing all took place in board rooms, at the IETF, and at conferences like VON for years with little-to-no progress. I just provided example of three groups (Cisco, Asterisk, and Skype) that have all prospered by dropping convention and tailoring something to suit their needs. The thing that separates them from the others is that while they might also have been part of the conversation, they had the good sense to ignore the PTA and go build it on their own.

The point is that it’s not about “making VoIP commercially viable” — who cares about VoIP? Screw VoIP. If Cisco could make billions of dollars shoving potatoes down Ethernet then you’d see the *all-new* Potato Feature Card for the AS5400 getting ramrodded through product management next Friday.

In the fall of 2001, Jeff Pulver and I argued about renaming Free World Dialup to something I said “should be five letters long and easy to pronounce”; should solve the NAT problem at zero cost to the network operator; should have auto-provisioning software and userID-based authentication; and should have certified pre-configured hardware as part of its business model. I’m a genius! I invented Skype!

The difference is while we were talking about it, others did it. So stories about those that wanted to and failed are usually worth the paper they’re printed on.

Unfortunately, just as they were starting to take off, one of their VCs tried to liquidate better performing companies to hide the dogs in their portfolio. All sorts of fun and hilarity ensued, and set off a chain of events that crippled the company. If this hadn’t happened, I think they would have created something a lot like Asterisk for brokering billable phone calls. Maybe that would have Skype like, maybe not, but it would have been useful. Skype got lucky because there was a vacuum waiting to be filled, and they had the advantage of learning from the mistakes from early innovators in the space. That’s a lesson everyone should be aware of as well.

That said, I’m not sure how isosynchronous ethernet, which was a Layer 2 effort requiring proprietary switches and transceivers and which obscured the value of Ethernet (generic common-class hardware and software) has anything to do with VoIP, which is a Layer 5+ effort implemented in software and preserving the value of Ethernet.

OpenH.323 was based on the widely-disparaged H.323 protocol, and without proprietary extensions such as we implemented @ Cisco was useless for anything but simple point-to-point calling. This is used mainly by commodity calling card networks and several failed conferencing platforms. H.323 emerged directly from the telephony working group at Intel’s Beaverton offices that developed their ISDN products and protocols, and so can claim direct heritage to ISDN.

H.323 simply implemented TDM, with all of its limitations and restrictions, over IP. This is why various groups scurried off to develop their own solutions, including MGCP, SIP, IAX (Asterisk), and Skinny (Cisco’s original Call Manager protocol). The first two of these were beleaguered by the design-by-committe process and ultimately failed to address core issues such as NAT. The latter two are widely successful because they threw away the open standards playbook and solved real problems.

What’s the lesson here, then? Skype was successful not because they were VoIP guys, but rather because they weren’t. As I pointed out in Who Killed the VoIP Revolution here at GigaOm, all of the so-called VoIP revolutionaries were so busy drinking their own kool-aid that they ignored reality — while a bunch of Estonians swept in and killed their market.

When architecting BuzMe, we looked at SIP and other protocols and decided to build our own. It had many of the same attributes of these, but ultimately they just didn’t service our needs insofar as signaling capabilities and NAT traversal. We were dealing with reality. So what’s the point of this piece?