Skype seems to have been static for the last few years. Which is surprising because 'skyping' is as much an everyday word for web-calling as 'googling' is for search. It's been under appreciated.
That just reflects the fact that you probably don't operate in a workplace where it isn't clear what mode of communication is meant when someone sets up a "call." At my multinational, explicitness is requisite since the requester could mean POTS-to-POTS (legacy PBXes), VOIP-to-POTS (Nortel softphone for the VOIP, connecting to older PBXes), VOIP-to-VOIP (Asterisk), Skype-to-Skype, or Skype-to-Voice (via VoSky).
When someone says "let's Skype" in my world, they either mean Skype-to-Skype (which is implicit if they are in your Skype contacts) or Skype-to-VOIP using one of our VoSky appliances that's tied into our PBXes. The verb "to call" is almost meaningless these days.
Or maybe he operates in a workplace where you can just pick up the phone at your desk and not worry about the implementation details of the underlying telephony infrastructure.
That was the point. I don't think there are any UCS platforms that encompass all possible good options, though, and people will always find ways to connect via the most direct endpoints jointly available.
really? crap, i must've misread something then. my fault. looks like you can use skype on most android phones anyway, though, just not as easily/freely as on verizon.
regardless, though, i think my original point still stands. skype hasn't been stagnant, they're making some moves.
> looks like you can use skype on most android phones anyway, though, just not as easily/freely as on verizon.
Serious question: any idea how? Everything I've read says it's limited to Verizon handsets, even when trying to install the .apk manually. I'd love to have Skype on my Vibrant.
They're probably putting a relatively small percentage of the company on the public market.
I don't know how much of Skype is being sold, but here's an example from Wikipedia:
"Google's initial public offering (IPO) took place five years later on August 19, 2004. The company offered 19,605,052 shares at a price of $85 per share. Shares were sold in a unique online auction format using a system built by Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse, underwriters for the deal. The sale of $1.67 billion gave Google a market capitalization of more than $23 billion. The vast majority of the 271 million shares remained under the control of Google, and many Google employees became instant paper millionaires. Yahoo!, a competitor of Google, also benefited because it owned 8.4 million shares of Google before the IPO took place."
Even worse, on techcrunch it says that most of that is from interest income (they must have a lot of cash in the bank). Cash from operations for the same time period is only $1.4 million.
Technical question regarding IPOs: is the offering for the entire stock of the company, or just a fraction, and how would potential investors know what fraction? $100m would be low for all skype share but high for 2%.
A (pre-determined and explicitly stated) fraction. Afterwards, however, shareholders are allowed to sell off their shares, provided they meet any lock-in/holding period requirements first. So, a founder might have to wait 6 months before he can unload his or her shares.
Well, not really, considering that Friis and Zennstrom sold it to ebay at a very high valuation and then managed to get paid again when they found out they missed a bunch of core tech.
If they had ipo'd a decade earlier they might not have made as much as they did.
I think it's more that the people on the eBay side were either morons or in breach of their own fiduciary duty to eBay shareholders. The deal terms were voluntarily accepted by eBay; terms which were insane. Plus of course the total lack of any strategic value for eBay. It was the worst tech M&A of its size.
I agree with the general sentiment there, but calling them 'crooks' is a step too far, they've been this side of the law or they would have been sued for sure.
I think the point is that due to network effects the winner actively holds back the losers, so you can't extrapolate from what happened in a world where Skype won to another world where they didn't. It would have been better for everyone if the winner had been an open standard and a very small change could have accelerated that solution to ubiquity rather than Skype, in the same timeframe.
Out of curiosity, another industry where this (the small change accelerating an open standard such that there are more winners [a higher tide overall]) is what happened? I'm not saying there aren't any--honest question.
Can the protocol be reverse engineered? I guess regardless it is dependent on connecting to some central switching service; but maybe there could be an alternative, open central service someday.
Relatedly, if Skype changes the protocol, does it break an installed base of clients, or do those get updated automagically?
SIP, STUN, RTP, XMPP, Jingle, all these are recognizable open protocols. Skype, if they were truly interested in not being a walled-garden, would have either built or migrated to a network based on these.
Skype will be dead in 10 years if Apple makes good on their promise to keep Facetime open.
Funny you mention XMPP in light of how many times people call [it] "Google Talk" (this seems to draw the ire the folks that know about the real 'recognizable open protocol' underneath).
There was 'speakfreely', but I think John Walker gave up on supporting all the different ways to get around fire-walls.
The kazaa code did that pretty good and Friis and Zennstrom figured a way to monetize their bag of tricks they'd created while creating kazaa. Remember how they sold off Kazaa but kept the fire-wall penetrating technology by licensing it back to the buyer (Joltid), then later they did the same thing with ebay and skype.
Given that they'd already pulled that one once before ebay was really pretty stupid to fall for it.
C++ as far as I know. Skype has its roots in Kazaa's file sharing technology, they use a proprietary P2P network to get around routers and firewalls - something that VOIP services lack. It also does direct high quality connections where available.
what do you mean exactly by getting around routers and firewall? I've been working with freeswitch and NAT is really a no brainer if you have a UPnP router. Firewalls? Does skype get around firewalls that are explicitly configured to block it? As far as 'direct high quality connections' are concerned, even freeswitch does that, it only does the SIP signalling and lets the media stream exchange directly between the endpoints, given that both can see each other directlly (no NAT in between).
NAT is really a no brainer if you have a UPnP router
Skype does much better than that. AFAIK they can traverse NATs and firewalls that don't support UPnP; they can fall back to TCP if UDP doesn't work; if all else fails they have a network of supernodes to relay traffic.
I just mentioned a UPnP router because I think most home routers I see here given buy ISPs support it. There are other ways as well, and yes that includes falling back to TCP if UDP doesn't work.
I'm just saying that everything skype does can be done with OSS using open standards. That skype is in any way technologically superior is mostly result of excessive FUD campaigns IMHO. :)
Skype has a big 'it just works' factor. With most sip and other products you had to deal with arcane stun server setup, and other configuration that would confuse most people. And on top of that the quality was significantly better than other options at the time such as msn and others. The combination of higher voip quality, ease of use, and no tech wizardry required (and a lot of marketing after they got rid of the tech hindrances) it went off.
Indeed. Whenever I looked in magazines targeted at casual internet users over the past decade, Skype was always the service recommended as "VOIP". It works through practically any network problem, which makes it ideal for hotels and from use inside corporate networks.
The quality is high, it's highly accessible and it doesn't have an equal competitor. Even the instant messaging services that do voice and video are poor alternatives. It has also been used for several years by feature phones and smart phones - some as their main selling point.
Essentially, its a pseudo standard used by most people.
Skype has become for VOIP as Google is to web search.
It may not be perfect but it's pretty darn good and it Just Works. It is almost ubiquitous and the company name has become a verb for a large segment of the popultion. "Let's Skype!"
