Kazaa, Lindows' Michael Robertson -- who's next to get into VoIP? Napster creator Shawn Fanning? It seems as if the same people who shook up the music industry are now focusing on the traditional telephone industry. Why is that?
The time is right to take on Internet telephony. Broadband penetration is high enough, and people are ready for it; it's been an unfulfilled promise for years. P2P technology is really very well suited for Internet telephony, so it is a natural next phase.
Why did you give Skype in an instant messaging (IM) user interface and combine it with a text-based form of communication?
Skype is telephony software, but we feel that instant messaging is a good supplemental feature. If you're talking to someone, you can chat with someone else at the same time. When we designed Skype's user interface, we tried to combine the ease of use of cell phones. Everyone knows how to use them. With instant messaging, it also gives you the ability to see when your friends are online.
So you are also taking on some real heavyweights -- all the major IM makers?
Again, Skype is telephony software, and the instant messaging capabilities are just supportive. People are getting Skype because it's the best telephony software available. That being said, we do think that many people are tired of bloated IM clients from large companies such as Microsoft and would be eager to replace it with something simple that just works.
Jeff Pulver of FWD is trying to make it possible for all SIP-based, computer-to-computer VoIP services to be able to dial one another. Is Skype participating in this effort?
Skype is using a proprietary protocol simply because SIP, which is the protocol most other companies are using, could not do what we wanted it to do. We believe that if you want to make something happen, you should not use whatever standards the telecom industry has defined. You need to innovate something that truly solves real-world problems. Having said that, we're very much for interoperability and will be happy to work with Jeff to make FWD and SIP interoperate with Skype.
Do you worry about backlash from traditional phone and cable companies? Couldn't these companies, for instance, invoke the "no multiple connections" clauses in their customers' contracts to thwart your efforts?
When you buy a broadband connection, you expect to be able to use it the way you choose. If an Internet service provider were to start blocking Skype, this would undoubtedly lead to disastrous public relations, a mass exodus of users to more friendly providers and the very real possibility of anticompetitive lawsuits. Besides, Skype only threatens those ISPs that also provide telephony services. Lots of ISPs only provide Internet access, and they will welcome anything that drives up demand for their broadband services.
Talkback
Hi Ben,
Thanks so much for the excellent Skype article. I hope there's a way to preserve the link to it for a few months because I just posted a HTML address link to it in the new Yahoo! discussion group, "SkyPe Voice Over Internet Protocol Software." Here's a link to this new discussion/self support group:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SkyPe-Software/
Imagine how overwhelming the computational task will be for decoding just 1000 simultaneous Skype voice phone calls with 256 bit encryption. Surely this won't be welcomed by national security agencies accustomed to performing mass voice to text conversion on "private" phone calls, then applying text interpretive algorithms to select those most interesting for human review. With enormous concealed government budgets, security agencies have seemed to be gaining on their goal of breaching personal privacy by electronic communication, given the sustained 18 month per computational power doubling rate. But Skype's very design appears to have made that goal almost unreachable. Wide adoption of Skype would cause the flow of 256 bit encoded traffic to undergo many doublings within a few months.
My Skype calling name is the easily remembered "lovelearn" should you ever want to chat. Obviously I don't want that referenced in any widely read articles or this new interest could dominate my time responding to calls.
I'd be delighted if you'd join this group and give it a boost by mentioning it where it seems fitting. It would be wonderful to have one or two of the Skype team principals join so they could occasionally field questions. We'd be happy to run any information gathering polls addressing questions about which they'd like to have user feedback. As soon as this new group appears in the listings, which requires human review and approval, I expect membership will grow rapidly.
All the best to you and thanks for your consideration,
John
(Please do not post my full name as I prefer to retain some privacy. I started one other newsgroup, Audi-VW-Diesels which now has 531 subscribers and over 14,000 archived messages. I'm certain this new Skype group will rapidly exceed that membership number.)
Excellent! Phones are becoming more and more fuctional. It seems that capabilities are being added everyday. I'd like to see high fedelity audio playback soon. I know it's coming.
Joel
<a href="http://Longboarders.org">Longboarders Organization</a>
I have allways wondered who was the person or persons who was putting these hundreds of blank dummy downloads on the Kazaa P2P system. I found out recently the film industry hires companies to put these blank downloads on the internet so as to discourage people from sharing movie files. Is there any way to tell a good movie from a bad movie before you download it.