More Reliability Problems at Skype

Not only does ooVoo not have a linux client it has no SIP support that I can find. The free service has ads, and if only one person is a paying customer it shows ads to that person, so you don't even know that you have a viagra ad under you.

However evil skype is, they have the basics. Tokbox looks interesting, but shows more signs of being a competitor to webex than skype.

Most SIP providers have horrible borderline unusable interfaces. Skype is very clean.

How useful Skype is depends on your relative rating of performance, reliability, consistency, support, openness and honesty. I'll run down just a few of the considerations here.

Performance - it works, for most people, most of the time. If you are one of those, you may use Skype extensively without ever having a significant problem with it. In this case, count yourself lucky.

Reliability - The most famous example of this, of course, is the four-day world-wide outage Skype had, and never explained. Imagine that you have built your business with Skype as an important part of it, and suddenly it is unusable for four days. How useful does that make it? Skype apologists will try to say that is a "thing of the past", but it continues to happen, mostly not world-wide, although there was another episode of it a week or two ago, which lasted a day or two and was never explained by Skype - unless you consider adding "Resolved" to the title of the entry in the Skype Heartbeat Blog to be an explanation. There was another less extensive episode last week as well.

Consistency - I'm not sure this is the right word for this, but what I am talking about is how they treat their "customers". One good example of this was the "London 0207 number fiasco". Basically what happened was that Skype notified all of their customers who had London 0207 Skype-In numbers that they were being cancelled, with the absolute minimum notice. Period. That was something like 10,000 numbers, the majority of which were most likely businesses. Imagine that you have built your business using a Skype-In number, and suddenly Skype decides to cancel it, and the only "compensation" is a new number in a different prefix. You have business cards, advertising materials, posters, billboards, painted vehicles, and whatever else, all with "YOUR" phone number, and suddenly you have to pay to have it all replaced. Tough beans, Skype says, that's your problem.

Support - If you are going to use Skype in your business, I would assume that you would be interested in being able to get some support when something goes wrong. Skype provides a chat/VoIP/Video service - but there is no support contact via any of their own services. Nor is there support via traditional phone, or fax, or email. None. The only way to "contact" support is via an online web-ticket system, which has a MINIMUM response time of FOUR DAYS, and an "real" response time that varies between weeks and never. This is regardless of whether you are seeking technical support for functional problems, or commercial support for billing problems, or because your Skype account has been hacked and the credit drained from it.

Openness - Skype boasts that communications using their product are "secure", because they are encrypted. But they seldom mention that they cooperated with the Chinese authorities to create a special version (TOM Skype) which, even when they admitted to it, supposedly allowed "censorship" of conversations. It was subsequently discovered by Canadian researchers that the Chinese had actually been tapping and recording conversations. When confronted with this information, Skype said they were "very concerned" - not that the Chinese had been doing that, but that they had been storing the recorded data on unsecure servers. Is this the kind of company that you want to use as an important part of your business?

Honesty - Several of the above examples can be considered in the category of "honesty". Here is another. Skype loves to hype their "500 Million Registered Users", or whatever the ridiculous, outlandish number they are spewing these days may be. They have made this a textbook case of "if you repeat something often enough and loud enough, it will eventually be accepted as fact". Look under the covers a bit, and you find that number is in fact the total number of accounts which have been opened since the absolute beginning if Skype. It is difficult and tedious, at the very least, to "close" an account - the normal, accepted and encouraged procedure is to simply "abandon" a Skype account. That suits their purposed just fine, because then that account still counts as one of their "500 million". It also includes the massive number of accounts that are created on a daily basis by the spammers, swindlers and pornographers who infest Skype space, and are used once, or perhaps for one day, and then abandoned. The best guess of actual "real" Skype accounts is somewhere around 10% of the number that they spout - still a very respectable number, no doubt, but what does it say about "honesty" when they insist on knowingly spreading such misleading information?

So, how "useful" is Skype for business networking? Think about these things which have happened in the past, and decide for yourself how dependent you can afford to make your business on it.

jw 7/2/2010