LEGO® brick analogies are overused. I’ll accept that. Nevertheless, this is the best I can do at the moment, so please bear with me. The simplicity of the base element – The Brick itself – is amazing. The ability to universally click together bricks of different sizes and colors created the whole universe of “things”.
Let’s just look at some facts:
- There are more than 300 million kids playing with LEGOs worldwide (not accounting for hordes of willing adult helpers).
- LEGO was named a “Toy of the Century” by Fortune magazine.
- The number of conventions, conferences and theme parks dedicated to LOGO is astonishing.
What started a little less than 80 years ago from the simple concept of a building base element – the brick – lead to the production of 6800 “bricks” of different shapes (that accounts for different colors too) which are used in the hundreds of different sets produced every year. While the sets are vastly different (think of “pirates” versus “star wars” series, for instance) the actual rectangular brick is the foundation of an absolute majority of the sets, coupled with the ability to reliably interlock all the brick pieces on top of each other. Even when lots of “bricks” lack even a single right angle, they will perfectly interlock to express one’s vision. While almost everything can be built from just the rectangular pieces, having “bricks” of very different sizes and shapes achieves a balance of excitement (while building) and cost. As a matter of fact, 6,800 different bricks resulted from the reduction of more than 12,000 last year – helping to improve the excitement versus cost balance.
So what is the relevance of the LEGO® story to the communications technologies state of the art? Of course we can build vivid messages using colorful bricks, and they will be far more enticing than the smoke signals (albeit effective in the really close proximity only), but this is not the point of the analogy. When building today’s IP Communication Solutions big and small, we got our choice of “bricks”. One of the most fundamental ones is the TCP/IP protocol itself – widely available, well understood, easy to use. Can we build everything using just that one “brick”? Well, we can build a lot, but this will require a lot of time, and excitement will dwindle long before we finish. Well, luckily, we have a lot more bricks to play with.
The next one, nice and colorful, is SIP, perfectly interlocking and sitting on top of the IP brick. As SIP is powering the majority of the IP voice applications today, it is also widely available and easy to use. Great, so can we build everything just using those two blocks? Well, again, we want a balance between cost and excitement. When we communicate today, the voice is used most often, true, but every time we can, we love to know if our friends are available in the first place (which is called Presence), and then add short text and image (or video) to make our communication more live. Can we build Presence/Voice/Text/Image/Video communication solutions just using SIP? Yes, we can, but it is cost and excitement, remember? So, how about a few more “bricks”? Ask, and you shall receive. Perfectly interlocking with SIP “brick”, you can now use SIMPLE and MSRP. SIMPLE is our “Presence” brick, and MSRP, which has nothing to do with “suggested price” but rather stands for Message Session Relay Protocol, is our “text message” and “image sharing” brick. Clicking together these pieces (SIP+SIMPLE+MSRP), plus some others which we don’t have time to discuss (like XDM) makes creation of the modern communication solution fun and easy! You don’t believe it? Give it a spin and let me know… Now I’m off to steal one of my son’s LEGO sets…
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