These, my friends, are hybrid times.

It seems as if, since the dawn of the Web in the 90s, our society has been in a 15 year never-ending digital transformation. The voracious appetite of this packet-based revolution never ceases. Industry by industry, medium by medium, the digital beast sets its sites on a new victim, and, slowly, the propriety walls crumble and new birth takes place. These transformations, while painful, have improved society by bringing us together and putting us in charge.

First there was email. This literally took the post office by storm. And, despite the best efforts of SPAM and viruses, email has become the firm standard for the bulk of written communication these days. Love it or hate, that baby is here to stay.

Then there was photography. While certain players, such as Kodak, were late to recognize the revolution, now all major camera manufacturers see digital photography as the future of the industry. Digital cinema, with its relatively recent 24-frames per second format and now digital HD codecs, is not far behind. Lucas proved that to us with his 100% digital filming of the recent Star Wars trilogy.

Now, you are hearing buzz about "IPTV" - the conjoining of your TV and the internet, or rather the IP mechanism of delivering content to your TV. Market leading cable and phone companies are scrambling to lay fiber and "Internetize" their delivery system for you. Newish players such as Tivo and Microsoft, each vying for control of your living room, have recently unveiled services to deliver you immediate content. Tivo with their "Unbox" service from Amazon and Microsoft's, with their Xbox Live content network -- where I can get as many hours of Borat as I can laugh at, fed to my living room, on my time. Startups Joost and newly minted Revision3 (who I just learned about at Om Malik's recent swanky soiree) will let YOU chose what you want to watch. So, don't "kill your television" just yet. Help is on its way.

Then, there is VoIP, or "voice over IP" - the emerging standard for digitizing voice traffic and sending it over the Internet vs. that thing that the birds sit on all day and use as a launching pad to drop bombs on your newly washed car. VoIP stands to undermine the multi-trillion dollar telecom services market and push all telephone calls towards free.

VoIP is awesome. You get Skype, I get Skype, we call each other and lament over how our girlfriends just dumped us because of a rare hygienic disorder that we both share. We talk, we laugh, we cry, I drink heavily during the call. We hang up. It was free.

But, during that call, there were moments where you couldn't hear me (that's OK, I was only blubbering as I banged another shot of Tequila). The call even dropped once, and you had to call me back. No biggie.

But for businesses, call quality IS a biggie. A bad call might be a lost sale. Lose enough sales and we will both be drinking together.

This is why VoIP has had such low adoption in the SMB. See, VoIP has been on a tear for consumers - who cares about quality? And, it has great penetration into larger enterprises (they have the money for great pipes and the ability to pay IT staff to sit around all day and futz with them). But, not the good 'ole SMB. As I say: "They want like enterprise, but spend like consumer."

Yep, for the SMB, VoIP is going to be a slow roll. The core routers of the Internet have to continue to upgrade, the broadband providers have to finish their fiber deployments, and the router companies (read this Linksys and Dlink) have to improve their handling of VoIP calls through packet prioritization and elegant quality of service implementations. This is my version of the "triple play." And, as these three forces advance in unison, SMBs will naturally get great VoIP quality and won't have to pay for it.

Until then, that thing with the birds on it, outside your window, is going to be around for quite some time. Use VoIP for a call saving mechanism, but don't rely 100% on it unless your network is ready.

This is why, today, we are launching trixbox Pro - the free business phone system. It uses a hybrid approach to long distance calling - using part VoIP and part that-thing-the-birds-sit-on. It also uses a hybrid approach to software, somewhere in between the old way of doing phone systems (ala Cisco and Avaya sending you a bunch of hardware to put on your network) and new "software as a service" managed model (ala Salesforce.com and Vonage) where you can use the Web anywhere to manage your phone.

We are a society forever in the transformation of digitization. But, we are also a society that must function and not sacrifice quality to gain efficiency. This means: YES we want it quick and YES we want it cheap. But it better be GOOD.

Until its GOOD, we are going to need to mix some of the old with some of the new.

These, my friends, are hybrid times.