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.

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.

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: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.