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Story: Skype tries to regain business users' trust

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Whose best interests did he say they were looking out for?

I have read this article through several times, and I still can't find any significant new information from Skype, and I certainly don't see what Skype was doing that could be construed as "defending its customers best interests". There is nothing in what Oberg says which comes close to explaining why they would suddenly decide to take away 10,000 phone number, with only 30 days notice, and a cutoff date five days before Christmas! Obviously they had made a commercial agreement with the company providing those numbers which they were no longer happy with, but rather than making the effort to work out the problem or at least make a reasonable transition period for their customers, Skype decided to just dump the problem on their customers.

As has been mentioned by a number of people who were affected by this, that blow could be fatal to their business - the cost of reprinting marketing literature, business cards, advertisements on vehicles, and on and on, added to the loss of business in the heart of the Christmas season, is tremendous.

One thing that Oberg didn't mention was that the electronic "voucher" that Skype gave to their customers as "compensation" for this was itself invalid in many cases, so when the customers tried to change their numbers to one of the new ones offered by Skype, the voucher was rejected and they were charged again for the new number! Talk about adding insult to injury!

Promises of "we are doing all we can to make sure it doesn't happen again" from Skype ring hollow, in light of the recent past. After the "great Skype outage" for four days last August, Skype made the same promise. But they recently had a two-day outage in much of the U.K., which (of course) was followed by more promises from Skype to do everything possible not to let it happen again...

A very large number of (former) Skype customers have in fact been able to keep their 0207 numbers, by changing their VoIP service to another provider! This obviously brings up the question - if a third party was able to "come to the rescue" of these customers, why could Skype not do so themselves if as they say "we had our customers' best [interests] as our top priority"?

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