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

I wish I were Dvorak

[drinkypoo]

when he makes painfully, pathetically obvious statements, he gets money. I just get derision, and strange looks.

Re:I wish I were Dvorak

[njfuzzy]

Or, in this case, probably modded-up.

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:I've recommended Skype to my clients

[Stanistani]

>We are located in Texas ...
>Now everyone at my company has a Chicago based phone number and we are claiming to have a Chicago-based office of operation because Vonage gives us a VOIP gateway that allows us to 'fake-it.'

Hi. I'm from the Illinois Department of Revenue. Your taxes are late.

How?

[mr100percent]

One thing I can't figure out is how Skype got so popular, when AIM Talk, Paltalk, Yahoo, and MSN all had voice chat features. Yahoo even had Karaoke rooms. Apple's iChat touted voice and video chat as one of its selling points for the OS.

So why did Skype do so well? Was it the marketing, or the catchy name? Or simple cross-platform compatibility? Or was it just a new brand?

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.

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

It's official

[ozric99]

Netcr^H^H^H^H^HDvorak confirms it - Skype is dying.

But have they learnt their lesson?

[matt me]

> Skype was written by the original authors of Kazaa, not Sharman Networks, the company who took it over and added all the malware.
True. The questions is when those guys sold their program to an evil corp, did they know what they were doing? How for so many ppl, Kazaa would be their first ugly encounter with spyware?

Would they do it again? Write a good app, build up a userbase, and then sell their users computers to be sacrifed to the Great Media Desktop?

I don't trust Skype yet. There are two equally bad scenarios. It is sold off to the spyware giants, or a virus infects the windows clients and users phone a premium rate number.

Read the Wikipedia article, and you'd be worried too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype

One problem I've hit with skype is...

[Johnno74]

How it chooses the proxy to use if you're behind a firewall and can't accept incoming connections.

I'm in New Zealand, and when me & a friend in another part of NZ tried out skype, the connection was routed via another skype user in germany.

Some background: NZ is pretty much at the arse-end of the world, and national network traffic is very fast and reliable, but if you go out to the rest of the world you add in about 150 ms latency, each way.

Connections to europe are even worse, as the connection typically goes from NZ to the US west coast, then to the east coast, and then to europe. And back.
Although our network infrastructure here is very good, international bandwidth is expensive, so broadband connections have a monthly traffic limit, of 1-10gb per month, depending on your provider and plan. One bonus of the provider I use is only 1/10th of your national traffic counts towards your bandwidth allowance.

So here I was, thinking the voice quality is pretty good, but there were a few glitches (probably dropped packets etc), but there was a latency of close to one second, and this local call was using my precious international bandwidth. Other calls had similar results - the quality is basically hamstrung into the worst case scenario.

Skype is very good in that It Just Works, but its almost completely devoid of any configuration or logging that tells you what its doing behind the scenes. My router supports uPNP, but sykye didn't even seem to be making use of that to route calls directly to me.

Has anyone in NZ had similar results? Have these problems been improved since I last looked?

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:Skype basically makes your PC a zombie

[cbiltcliffe]

That's not a zombie. That's a peer-to-peer node. Huge difference.

Remember that whole thing about how you can't shut down a P2P filesharing service when there's no central server? Well, there's no central server for Skype, either. That's how it can be a free service. If you use the service, you provide resources for managing the service. You don't pay for it in money....you pay for it in infrastructure.

I'd never even really thought of it like that before, either. Pretty simple concept, really....