John Dvorak Hypes Skype

Eh-Wire writes "John Dvorak gets all warm and fuzzy over Skype now that 30,000,000 users have registered for the free Internet telephony service. Dvorak extols the installation as, "smooth and elegant" and continues with, "Without any tweaking whatsoever it works immediately and works better than anything else I've used." Skype has appeared on the radar without pomp and fanfare and it doesn't look like it's going off screen any time soon."

Comments

Kazaa authors != evil spyware people

[Mitchell Mebane]

Skype was written by the original authors of Kazaa, not Sharman Networks, the company who took it over and added all the malware.

I've recommended Skype to my clients

[gbulmash]

Recently some clients of mine were talking about signing up with Vonage or another VOIP provider to get cheaper calls between their main office and a satellite office. I immediately told them "Skype". Why pay $30 a month per seat for Vonage business lines, and have to hook up complicated hardware (I never got Vonage to work until I got their software based service, which is a $10 a month *add-on*) when you can pay a 1-time fee for headsets/handsets, and use Skype for free. They don't want incoming phone numbers or to make general outgoing calls. They just want to cut their phone costs for the 50 times a day they're calling the satellite office or the satellite office is calling them.

For businesses wanting to cut costs between satellite offices, families wanting to cut long distance charges when calling between family members, etc., Skype is the natural solution.

- Greg

Re:I've recommended Skype to my clients

[cduffy]

For businesses wanting to cut long distance charges between satellite offices, families wanting to cut long distance charges when calling between family members, etc., Skype is the natural solution.

...whereas SIP is the standards-based solution. Particularly for businesses (where a bit of extra setup cost is managable in return for longer-term flexibility and savings), getting a proper, standard-based VoIP setup using Asterisk is The Right Thing:

• A number of vendors' hardphones are available, almost all of which have vastly more sophisticated features than the little USB phones which are sold for use with Skype.
• You can run your own voicemail / menu trees / custom phone-based applications / etc, and customize them as you like, without paying a thing for the privilege.
• You have a wide array of codecs to choose from (so you can optimize for bandwidth, sound quality, resiliance against dropped packets, etc).
• You can run your own interface into the conventional phone system, or choose the vendor through which to do so, rather than needing to pay Skype for the privilege.

For communications between family members, Skype is fine -- but for even semi-serious business use, it's woefully inadequate.

Re:Once a spyware co always a spyware co...

[meiemiiz]

Oh, give them a break. Both Kazaa and Skype were developed by a couple of Estonians (4 to be exact), the first without _any_ embedded spyware at first. Kazaa was simply their hobby until a couple of Swedes saw a business model in it and bought it. After they sold Kazaa (yes, the spyware was included by the financers order), the team itself (Swedes the financers + Estonians the programmers) stayed together and went on with another pet project of theirs - Skype. Skype had some additional finance from Silicon Valley based risk capitalist Jurgenson (an Estonian too) and has been developing very rapidly since. Now all the marketing + business relations are handled from London and all the programming from Estonia. Don't blame the programmers, blame the business models.

In case you wondered, I am an Estonian too and proud of our most successful international project to date.

How Skype Works

[shadowmatter]

The only problem is that the protocol is proprietary and only Skype knows how it works. This seems to offend a lot of people.

There's a good paper investigating how it all works here. Interesting stuff.

- shadowmatter

Re:Desktop to POTS not so hot

[kikensei]

I totally concur. I had my wife try it to call her family in Japan. It was useless. I switched to broadvoice VOIP, for $25/month that includes umlimited US to Japan. Muuuuch better.

Re:How?

[DingerX]

First off, let's just start by saying that, reading TFA, he's just an idjit. "nobody but skype knows how skype works?" Check /. from a few months ago, and you'll find a scholarly article linked on how skype works. They ain't hiding anything. Likewise for the history lesson: a lot happened between 95 and now that didn't include Net2Phone; I remember trying to patch calls on Delta3 (which sucked).

Okay, so why _does_ skype work?
1) no malware/adware. Make all the Kazaa cracks you want, but the moment skype starts screwing with people's bandwidth, it's gone. (Note to self -- if I ever get a fat up pipe, choke the upload on the skype box so it doesn't get named a supernode).
2) secure communications: encryption matters, folks. Here's a messenger and VoIP program that doesn't send stuff in the clear; it's actually useful for business comms.
3) shady network code: by routing stuff through port 80 and NAT tricks, it bypasses the vast majority of firewalls; nobody gets a message that they can't get through. Instead, it works, but voice runs through a crappy high-latency, high-failure rate TCP connection (which, by the way, has gotten better).
4) most importantly, simplicity of installation. Most of the time, Skype requires zero configuration. Folks, this is the most important UI lesson of our time. Unless your primary market is Asia, you want installation and UI to involve the fewest steps possible. Each step you add loses about 90% of your audience. Skype works from when you hit "install".

Sure, there's the problem of "how do we pay for this?"; but with distributed networking their overhead right now is a website, some coding and a server in denmark. If they can make skypeout/in pay the bills, it will be good for all; if they can't, well, on the bright side, a lot of people turned on to the technology will start looking for FOSS solutions.