Skype's in Trouble!
I don’t take enjoyment from other peoples missfortunes, but I’m making an exception for this one. It looks like Ebay haven’t had quite the success they’d hoped for with Skype and have admitted to paying too much,. Not much of a surprise really, and I’d like to think that having a non-globally sustainable business model (charging for calls to a legacy system, but the new being completely free) has been part of the problem.
Why am I happy? Because I’m hopeful that this is the beginning of the end of the Skype monopoly, its closed protocol, and customer lock-in. The skype outage was just a warning sign of what happens when you depend on one single provider; 220 million people left without a phone connection, and is likely to have set many an alarm bell ringing. Who’s to say how they’ll try and make up for the losses, maybe a subscription fee? That would be popular!
Of course, this begs the question, if Skype is so rubbish, why do millions of people use it everyday? Convenience. Skype was indeed one of the first VoIP services that “just-worked”. No need to worry about cheap broadband modems or tightly controlled company networks, skype’s secret language will barge its way through all but the most stubborn of networks, tunnelling its traffic through ports normally only open to normal web page traffic and by searching for other users computers to redirect the data through.
Its an impressive hack, but is certainly not a long term solution. In the end it just hinders the development of more open, standard protocols, and the real ways the world can become better connected. The way I see it, there are two possible roads for skype; everyone accepts that skype has the market control and pay-up, or it fizzles out as the open standards become easier and better.
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