Wednesday, August 20, 2008

One year and still kicking

A while back, when reports of several executives leaving the company were floating around, many people were writing Ooma off.

So far, it hasn't happened. The company appears to have many happy users. Looking around the net, it looks like there are a lot of people that hate the company and/or business model, but none of them actually seem to have the product. Among people that actually have Ooma, they seem overwhelmingly happy with it.

In my case, there have been a few outages, and I've never been able to get the Scout to work on my phone wiring, but otherwise the Ooma system has worked as advertised. The call quality has been good to excellent and it works more often than not. There have been a few quirks with local calling and I swear the ooma box sent a few long-distance calls that were placed by some other Ooma user somewhere through my landline, but I have not made a big fuss about it since it has only happened a few times (it does make me nervous though).

Even with the price reduced to $250, the biggest concern of potential buyers is still whether the company will exist long enough to recover the cost. There were rumors a few weeks ago that Ooma fired all their web developers and maybe a few support people but I have not seen news reports confirming it.

Personally, I hope they survive because that's how I'm making most my long-distance calls these days (those made from the house anyway). Unfortunately, I don't know how much I'm saving or how many minutes I'm actually using because these calls don't appear on my bill anymore and Ooma doesn't have on-line call logs or provide usage statements.

No comments: