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Skype's Sale As Media Feint
ansak writes "Bob Cringely's latest article shows evidence that some aspects of the 90s bubble are indeed back: Why would Rupert Murdoch think of paying $3billion for a mostly free online service like Skype? But his last line shows a keen understanding of Murdoch's skills and methods: 'By putting Skype in play, he distracts for no money at all most of the major media companies. And while they try to figure out how to respond to VoIP, old Rupert will be attacking them on some completely other front. He'll be stealing their shoes.'"
I like Skype and MSN Messenger over Yahoo's voice for several reasons:
First, Yahoo does not always transmit voice. So there is that weird silence when nobody is talking. I better like hearing the backround noise because it makes you feel more "emersed".
Secondly, voice quality of MSN Messenger and Skype depend on your microphone and Internet connection. I recall calling a 56K user and having near-32bit quality. Another time, I've called a radio station (which had an excellent microphone and a decent Internet connection) and the quality was astounding (at a whopping 128kbps)!
MSN Messenger, only has two quality modes. I call them good and bad. The bad quality will mask some backround sound and transmit at 32bit, while the good quality even goes beyond Skype, many times. Of course, because of Microsoft, proper connection detection fails at multiple times and sometimes the voice simply does not work!
Now, let's get on a bad side of Skype (uh oh!) Skype uses quite an abundant percent of CPU compared to other programs. On a 800MHz computer, Skype takes up a whopping 80% while MSN remains at a low 5%. This is bad if you're trying to play some FPS game togethor or surf the web. Skype is preservative on bandwidth, though.
On the alternatives side, we have the usual VO-IP programs used by gamers and communities: Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. I prefer Ventrilo as it's quality can be comparted to MSN Messenger, but TeamSpeak is a bit preservative and goes at a way lower quality. Both these alternatives are excellent when chatting in groups.
So, to conclude:
Skype
Advantages
o Conference support
o Great quality
o Stable and reliable
o Nice interface
o Multi Platform --- Yay for Linux support!
o Low bandwidth consumption
o Bypasses firewalls greatly (I've tested with many corporate firewalls and Skype knows it's way around it!)
Disadvantages
o High CPU usage
o Not excellent for 56K connections
Until next time,
Paulius
The hip way to get your IP. No ads, ever.
Great Cingely post. Rupert has been "feinting" on Internet matters with his peers for over a decade. Notable is his speech to his peers a few weeks ago. See http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/04/ss_15.html His recent announcement of a Fox Internet unit also has these elements. More here: http://mp.blogs.com/mp/2005/07/on_news_corp_cr.htm l
Gizmo is trying to compete... we'll see how that pans out.
GizmoProject uses SIP, which makes it a little bit more open.
You missed out some key disadvantages:
1)Skype isn't open-source. You can't read the source code, therefore you can't necessarily trust it. I'm not naturally inclined to give the makers of kazaa the benefit of the doubt.
2)Skype is gratuitously incompatible with the rest of the world, and uses a closed protocol. This is unforgivable.
3)Skype is P2P - which means that in some cases, such as Cambridge University, it cannot be used, because a user of the university network may not grant network bandwidth to non-members.
If you want a good Linux SIP phone, try Linphone + FreeWorld Dialup.
I like Cringely's articles because they are always insightful, always look at things from a different angle, and almost always feature a prediction that I find very unlikely but compelling enough to make me look at the given topic in a different light (which is strikingly different from Dvorak articles, which are always inept, look at things from the same angle as everyone else but with cracked bifocals, and prove the adage that even a blind squirrel finds a nut from time to time).
That having been said, Skype is a very dangerous thing for the big telecom providers. As Cringely points out, the big phone companies can't buy it to kill it because something else would take its place. But he misses that this also holds for cable companies.
I use Skype Out regularly to call internationally, and I know that nobody calls to PSTN networks for less unless they own the switch on both ends.
Comcast et al want to sell VoIP on top of broadband, but Skype (or its successor) is free with broadband -- which brings up the whole bit about synergy and technical capabilities and whatnot.
Since the whole Skype backbone is P2P there really isn't a whole lot of infrastructure involved, other than the database for paying customers. There's no real physical infrastructure because the users are the network. As I understand it, Skype only has a few dozen employees (but I may have read that a while ago, before they had 20 million regular users).
The fact that there's basically no infrastructure means that it will be hard for a big incumbent operator to leverage its network size to take advantage of something like Skype. The whole Skype network costs its operators next to nothing to run right now, so how is MegaCableTeleCom, Inc (with all its buildings and employee unions, and executive bonuses, and specialized equipment, and miles and miles of plain-old-copper/coaxial/fiber lines, etc) going to keep it cheap enough to compete with free without losing?
Cringely's right -- Murdoch won't pay $3 billion, but somebody probably will. Only what's for sale is not the network but the customers. And those customers will flee in a minute if whoever runs Skype starts acting like a phone company -- cryptic bills, mystery charges, line-carrier fees, connection charges, etc. After all, something better and cheaper will come along any day now. For $3 billion, I'd sell.
"I'm not naturally inclined to give the makers of kazaa the benefit of the doubt."
The makers of kazaa are not the same people that riddled it with spyware (Sharmann Networks, or whatever it was...).
Who doesn't like free music?
Why would Rupert Murdoch think of paying $3billion for a mostly free online service like Skype?
I dunno, but a better question might be, why would