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EBay Admits To Bad Call On Skype
MaineCoasts writes "The Times online reports that two years after buying Skype for 2.6 billion, Ebay yesterday warned shareholders that they may have made a mistake. In essence, they vastly overpaid for the company. ZDNet offers analysis of the announcement: 'Clearly, the current business model is not enough to satisfy eBay in light of how much the company spent on Skype. And the reason is simple. Even though Skype has done a very good job of getting users to download its software client, most people who use the service do so to make free Skype-to-Skype phone calls. The only way that Skype makes money from its subscribers is when people use its Skype-In or Skype-Out services. Skype-In allows users to pay to rent a phone number, which people on regular phones can call. Skype-Out allows users to call traditional phones or cell phones for a fee.'"
SKYPE - 200 million+ users - Used, LIKE NEW! A++++ SELLER
Buy It Now: $2,000,000,000
Current Bid: $5.50
Hmmm... smells like the bubble could be collapsing.
Just out of interest: Of everybody you've ever hear talking about Skype, how many mentioned the free Skype-Skype calls and how many mentioned you can pay to call others, too? (It's about 50:1 with quite a lot of non-techies in the 50 and an ex-coworker in the 1 group...)
- Just because a company has a huge and growing audience doesn't mean it can find a huge revenue source. Skype's appeal is that it offers services free or very cheap. That limits its ability to raise prices. And it turns out that there are limited opportunities for advertising or add-on services.
- It's almost impossible to pay for a deal through "synergies." EBay executives talked about how Skype would be useful to connect buyers and sellers in its marketplace. This always seemed to be hooey. The eBay market is already full of chatter, mainly by e-mail, and sometimes by phone. Sure, some of that might well be handled by Internet phone, but how much and what value was created by eBay owning its own voice chat system? Not much, it turns out.
I think the second point is the most important. This deal was easy to criticize because they didn't know what the hell they were going to do with it. They had no forward plan. Where were they taking Skype? What were they going to do with it? How was it going to make money? Nobody knew. And, most importantly, eBay didn't either.So why did they make the deal? Maybe they felt pressure. Maybe it looked like easy cash. One thing is for sure, it never came to fruition whatever they saw in the company. I personally liked the tool but once you start asking for cash, you can expect to see your user base taper off. You're competing with something that is already incredibly cheap in the states. If it ain't free, you're going to have problems operating in the black. If it is free, you better have some mad advertising revenue or market data stuff to sell
Google knew where they were going with the YouTube purchase. It's now pretty clear eBay didn't know exactly what they were going to do. But, hey, they could treat it like Microsoft's original Xbox venture, "We lost a lot of money but fsck it, we've got a ton to lose and I'm bored with being the top dog in a single market!"
My work here is dung.
Imagine that. You offer a free service to people and they use it. Seems a bit odd to now say you're not making money because people aren't willing to pay for one of your other services.
To top it off, a technology company now claims they paid too much for you.
Those who cannot remember the past and all that comes to mind.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
...two years after buying Skype 2.6 billion...Honestly, this was another classic case of someone with money looking at a wildly successful and completely unprofitable business and snapping it up without some serious thought to how to make it profitable or more importantly if it was possible to make it profitable.
None of these businesses that provided expensive service for free and whose selling point was that it was free have ever managed to become profitable. eBay should've known better when buying a business in 2005.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
is that however ridiculous ebay's "future bizness model" will be, it will be forced down the throat of skype users due to closed source and the proprietary protocol.
In exactly the same way as the first. "Old money" companies (as 1st generation dotcom companies like eBay are now, in comparison) paying way too much money in speculation, for a piece of the "next big thing". Next Big Thing fails to materialise as a sustainable business enterprise, money is wasted.
3 years ago, it seemed like everyone and their mom was getting into VoIP. I remember asking someone writing one, how are they going to make any money? He answered, get bought out by a big corporation.
Well, it worked for Skype, I guess.
If you really want your life to get more interesting, give us your husband's cell number.
To ebay – get your act together or you'll lose most of your current paying skype customers (and forget about growth)
The Raven
This announcement is a prelude to eBay shopping Skype to the highest bidder. Even though it is not a cash cow Google, Microsoft and possibly Yahoo will be falling over themselves to buy for it's strategic value.
Personally, I hope whomever buys it, they open up the protocol as, if it does open, it could be THE voice platform.
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Not to run anyway, VOIP is a very cheap service ignoring patent litigation.
Don't be too hasty. There are two avenues that open up huge potential for revenue:
In short, there is a HUGE untapped market out there. If EBay would stop trying to milk their investment and would start investing more into it, they could really get some substantial returns.
GreyPoopon
--
Why is it I can write insightful comments but can't come up with a clever signature?
If you target a price consious market, you need to be competitive ;-}
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
When I woke up I could hear Niklas and Janus laughing all the way from Europe...
ROTFL LOL hehehehe
SUCKERS!
I use SIP extensively, it's an open protocol, used by Asterisk and is implemented by a heap of companies, providing a range of services in a range of countries. Skype uses their own protocol, and has low call quality. This isn't what I want to be paying for when buying services such as Skype In or Skype out.
SIP allows me to connect to networks without hassle and without problem. Half of Skype's problems that I see is the fact that they are using a closed protocol, again, the call quality is too low to be considered acceptable as well.
If they managed to fix this, I would be a lot happier to move everything onto one provider. I currently have to subscribe to three different service providers to get what I want, this means three bills, three accounts (In different countries, so different currencies as well) to manage and three times the headaches.
If they started offering a decent solution, and I would be one of the first to jump ship.
Berny
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
And they don't mention whatever benefit they manage to gain by stealing users passwords and other data, as referenced here: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/26/1312256
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
This just demonstrates that owning a connection or bit of network infrastructure isn't worth much because it's too easy to find an alternative connection. The same "route around damage" ethos of the internet makes it a "route around cost" mechanism too. Skype users, like all good internet routers, only pick the Skype connection when it's free. This is why we see such battles with the telcos trying to change the playing field (e.g., lobbying hard to prevent net neutrality and open access regs) so that they can charge more than the marginal price (which is near zero per added user) for use of their infrastructure (which costs millions or billions to build).
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
...just release it as open source and dump it!
Seriously, it could make money by having you seeing advertisements during your conversations.
The only reason I use Skype is because it's free. And if they ever start using it as a platform to push ads I'll be dropping it. I'll use Ventrilo or something similar, or go back to AIM since most of my communications using Skype are just normal text IMs.
Also, the Skype linux client SUCKS, they're really letting it lag behind the Windows version.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
And I'll tell you another company that is waaay overvalued.....facebook. $10 billion? Even $1 billion is too much. There will always be hype and over priced companies in the technology industry......mainly because every once in a while a technology comes along that really is worth it. The question is how do you know?
Business people have trouble with this kind of thing because they don't understand the technology. As in this case, they thought 'skype will be super-popular' which may be true, but they didn't see that once everyone has Skype no one will need Skype out.
Tech people and engineers tend to have trouble with it because they tend not to understand marketing, business prospects, or what people want. They say things like, "Less space than a nomad, no wifi. Lame" or "This is the year of linux on the desktop" and don't understand why most people aren't interested in open-moko or the gimp.
If you DO happen to understand both of them, it will be a competitive advantage that can make you a killing in the stock market. As anyone who invested in nintendo a year ago knows.
Qxe4
Because if Skype started offering what you would consider a decent solution (open protocols, interoperability), then suddenly all other clients could/would support Skype, and nobody would use their client. This is the only piece they would control, and with fewer people using it means less control and less revenue.
Skype doesn't open everything up because they have MUCH more to lose than to gain. They have the userbase, and they have the lock-in, all they have to work out is how to "monetize" that (ugh, hate that word)
Who cares about Skype when we have iCall http://www.icall.com/ where one can make free (and I mean free) phone calls throughout the US and Canada, without dolling out dollars to Ebay? Skype executives should wake up and smell the coffee.
I am obviously in the minority of users who pay for Skype services. I live in the UK and my family is in Australia. Using Skype-Out at a rate of around £0.1/minute is significantly cheaper than any comparable Telecom or other "cheap calls" organisation. I know quite a few other people who use Skype in the same manner. I spend around £5 per month on Skype.
Now in comparison, I spend somewhere between £50-£90 per month on my mobile phone. The amount largely depends on whether I've traveled out of the UK that month. With wider adoption of VoIP services on mobile devices, for sure my cell phone bill would drop and a portion of the money would siphon across to my Skype account.
The final thing holding me back from spending more on Skype is the expense and poor quality of the "phone" devices available. I spent £100 about a year ago on a Skype Wi-Fi phone. No need to have anything connected to my computer, the phone's base unit was supposed to connect directly to my wireless router and behold, I have Skype calls very easily. Unfortunately, after waiting almost a month for my order to be fulfilled, within 3 weeks the phone unit died. I gave up trying to get a refund from Skype and trashed the thing. So far I've been reluctant to spend a similar amount on a device that may die again quickly and have to deal with Skype customer service.
Brought to you by the author of such childrens' classics as "Some Kittens can Fly!" and "All Dogs go to Hell."
... such as business users. I have hundreds of Skype Out contacts, and so do all of those people in my contacts list. However, due to Skype's expensive per-call surcharge and the recent outage, most are now looking for alternatives. I still use Skype for Skype-to-Skype, but otherwise I use one of the Betamax voip services for calling regular phones.
Otherwise, there would have been more characters typed. And nobody ever, EVER, makes stupid mistakes in slashdot posts, and if they ever do, well, then the top-notch editors fix them up before the post makes it up there.
Didn't take a brain surgeon to see they vastly overpaid...the day of the announcement. Cheers to the guys who got ebay to pay them that much cash for a free service.
Doesn't the admission of error mean that there is now the possibility of legal action by the shareholders?
I only go to buffets for the unlimited soft serve.
Of course Zennström & co wanted to push up the price, but in the end the buyer is at fault by doing an insufficient market analysis.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I have used SkypeOut extensively, and SkypeIn to a lesser extent. Dealing with a cumbersome network of local telephone service providers, Skype has never been able to get these services working reliably. SkypeOut is good enough for personal use, but not reliable enough for business, and forget about conference calls - the connection would never stay up long enough for that. SkypeIn was much worse - I think most users had about a 50% success rate, assuming it was available in one of the regions that you could use it. Nevertheless I continued to use SkypeOut for convenience, until they decided earlier this year that adding a connection fee would be a really good way to boost the revenue. Now I can call cheaper using my home phone service. Goodbye SkypeOut. It sure looks to me like Skype is in the declining phase that you see when accountants take over - attempting to boost revenue from the existing customer base without innovating or expanding.
far too much deception to sort through/disbelieve, could leave one's sense of self in question/missing/held hostage.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if Skype is making $90 million a quarter and rising, that's $360 million a year, or almost 14% ROI. Most companies would kill to make that much.
I use SkypeIn and SkypeOut, paid up for a year. For what my wife and I paid in cell phone bills for a month (2 phones), we now have home service for a year (we have a paid-by-the-minute phone for emergency purposes when traveling). Roughly $70 a year. I can't complain. We don't use free skype-to-skype calling because none of our friends/family use it yet.
Just wanted to let you know that we saved a ton of money on our phone bills by switching to Skype!
There is an excellent book that came out fairly recently:
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Swan-Impact-Highly-Improbable/dp/1400063515/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-9935606-8991319?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1189099290&sr=8-1
In it, the author discusses the phenomenon of break away opportunities that no one sees coming. It is very relevant to the software industry and generally to venture capital as well. The moral of the story is that it's often very hard to predict ahead of time whether something represents a huge Black Swan (breakaway) opportunity (i.e. Google or the "Next Anything"), so companies often pay a lot of money to expose themselves to the conditions under which Black Swans emerge in order to take advantage of them. Sure, it's expensive, but there has to be massive risk and it sure sucks to be on the losing side of the equation. The Dot Com Bubble 1.0 wasted massive money, but it was ironic that Google came along right at the end of the bubble, and generally there were plenty of success stories where now Google, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo are the winners in a winner-take-all market. The barriers to entry are so high in building massive data centers, that most companies will have to be content to build on top of the existing infrastrucutre + frameworks (web services API's etc) that have already been put in place.
It's been stated many times but it bears repeating. Just because you have a product that is A+, doesn't necessarily mean that it will be successful. What makes a product successful is the business behind it. Look at McDonalds! Crappy product but good business!
Of course, in Murders and Executions, it is up to the buying company to decide before getting heavily invested. They might have an excellent product but ass for business processes. Companies are not only buying-out shareholders but they're also paying to un-ass a company's old business processes in order to fit with their own.
Ebay... what can I say? I expected more out of them.
The game.
I know this is /. but some consistence wouldn't hurt at all!
P1eA5e...
They wanted to be the first to own the new phone with flashy interface and Internet abilities, right?
They got what they bought. They have nothing to complain. If they paid the price, then they clearly thought it was worth it. There's no point now in releasing sad, sad statements in the public that they feel cheated or were wrong.
Wait, I forgot what we're talking about..
Well, there's still no 64bit Skype (any OS), the Linux version does not even have half the features of the Windows version, and the Windows version has hooked up with what many would describe as dubious company like Paypal ("send money too..." feature). The user base seems to have grown, but that's about it. I have no sympathy for ebay.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
I thought that the "give everything away for free and hope profit magically appears" online business model was long dead, a victim of the last tech bubble bursting. In any case, the solution here is pretty simple, start charging for content like almost everyone else has eventually had to once a solid customer base has been established. Start with "premium members only" content for a small extra fee, then gradually make it impossible for anyone to get anything significant from the service without coughing up the dough. That will ease the difficult transition from free to pay without ruffling more feathers than necessary. True, Skype will lose a percentage of its customer base, but does it really want to keep those who are never going to pay? On a side note, anyone think this announcement has anything to do with a certain Skype CEO stepping down...
Tierzero provides MPLS, DS1, DS3, VoIP and VPN in Southern California
Is the fact that if you don't use any of your Skype-out credit in a 6-month period, they'll hoover up the balance of your account. I know it's in the TOS, but it's still a nasty shock when they clean you out.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
This IS 2000 all over again. Wait until the social networking sites that are being valued in the 2-10 billion dollar range yet only bring in a couple of mill a year in revenue start collapsing then it will really get ugly.
I think the invisible hand of the market has its middle finger extended
--A wise old fart named SC0RN
Yes...but how do you suppose you ever do make money on the Next Big Thing, if you never take what looks at the time like quite a risk?
The rate of return on an investment is always determined by its risk. That's because the rate of return is the "price" those who want the capital must pay for the right to borrow your money. Obviously if the investment is quite safe, borrowers can pay a low price for your money. That's why the US Treasury can pay a measly 4 to 5% interest on the money it borrows. It's a very safe investment.
On the other hand, people who think they have the Next Big Thing, technology-wise, and are rushing to bring it to market without a totally clear idea of how they'll monetize the whole shebang are clearly presenting you with a very risky investment, and hence must pay enormous rates of return to get your money. So that kind of investment pays hugely, when it pays at all. It's basically the only way ordinary people (people not gifted with superhuman looks or athletic ability) can get rich.
It's all well and good to inveigh against "foolish" risk with your (or your stockholders') money -- as long as everyone is willing to settle for a 1% real rate of return, so everyone can stay middle class, and no one's ever going to get rich. But if you have bigger ambitions -- if you insist on the chance to strike it big -- then there is no option other than taking 'foolish' risks, because only risks that look foolish to cooler heads will ever pay off big.
(And of course when they do pay off, the cooler heads will immediately fall all over themselves explaining how it was actually clear that this investment was clever and low-risk, and the fact that the cooler heads didn't invest in it themselves at the time was due to some curious accident, a conspiracy, a missed phone call, it all happened before they were born, or whatever.)
So why is eBay surprised?
I was at the talk he gave at VoN in Toronto... if I remember correctly, he said it would be about $10million/mo, which looks fairly accurate. His entire talk was a rant about people being ripped off by traditional Telcos. He announced he would take the $Billions made in Telecom, squeeze it down and turn it into just $Millions and then take it all for Skype.
He said that there was just no way to make huge profits off of Voice with a ubiquitous internet. It's in the VoN presentation he gave, I assume one can find the proceedings somewhere...
Now fast forward about a year... I was talking to VCs about my company. Some had invested in Skype, and now the story was different. Someone would want to leverage Skype's huge base of customers, making Skype worth $Billions. Leverage for what, they were sure someone would figure out (advertising maybe).
So. Now the question is did Zennstrom and Co. tell eBay these things. That is, "we don't know how to make a business model out of this that's worth $Billions, just $Millions" or did they lie? If he didn't tell them this, eBay didn't do their diligence given that both pieces of information were readily available from Zennstrom's and his VCs previous statements.
I think Skype could take over the world and be worth a fortune, but Ebay's implementation has so far been lacking the key element to my plan, which I'd assumed was also their plan. They need a cheap (like, $10) home-PBX to ethernet interface box. Like Vonage sends you. In fact, they should offer a service exactly like Vonage, but with no monthly fee. A small fee for a call-in number from regular phones and a small fee for calling out to regular phones, and no charge for contacting Skype other users, just like now. Then make the thing work with everyday phones with a home PBX, so you buy this box and don't have to mess with a computer at all; all your home phones just work like regular phones, like Vonage or other VOIP phones. And all your calls to anyone else on the same system are absolutely free, because there's no per call charge/time charge/or monthly charge. It's a huge incentive to adopt the system.
Yes, for the free Skype to Skype calls using conventional phone handsets, they'd need some sort of coding so numbers dialed on the phone get translated to Skype handles by the PBX box. I don't think this would be too hard to implement.
Yes, if everyone adopted it, they would eventually lose their revenue model. But this would only happen if they came to dominate the entire home phone market, and then they can make it up with services- voice mail, ringing multiple phones with one number, call recording software, etc. Also, they'd still always make money on their fees for calling out to cell phones. I think the dangers of lost revenue do a near-monopoly on voice communications is a far-off concern.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
look, i know some people who use skype b/c their friends use skype. they know that it's no good. they even say that in discussions. but they are afraid of "losing their friends".
for most people, this is way more important than slightly degrading quality of service - hell, even icq is accepted by sheeple these days, despite it featuring heavy ads and stuff.
that said, a real friend would a) understand the issue at hand and b) find other means of communication.
Google didn't make a mistake buying skype, it made a mistake in not using it. Google wields amazing power, and, properly leveraged, could create a huge and dominant market force.
.web TLD. Everyone who signs up gets their own gmail account, blog, skype account, gpay account, etc. all tied to their accountname.tld. Blogger becomes the hub for your digital presence, holding your contacts, meetings, calendar, digital storage, and well, everything else. Anywhere you go in the world, your new google-pda, which is an iPhone on crack, synchronizes your life. Need to make a phone call? Skype handles it. Even mobile to mobile, free, over the wifi infrastructure. Need to access spreadsheets, documents, important business functions? Google has you covered. Need to make a skypeout phone call? It comes straight from your gpay account. Need to buy something at the local store? You can g-pay right there, using your phone.
So far, Google has:
Dark Fiber
G-pay
G-mail
G-talk
Skype
Google
Blogger
YouTube
Metric assloads of cash
What Google needs
A TLD.
Wireless everywhere.
Here comes the evil...
Google champions the
Google licenses the skype protocol to Cisco, etc, so that businesses can buy a Skype PBX. Google markets their 'Google Business Application Server', which will synchronize spreadsheets, documents, mail, and pretty much everything else, including your digital life. Number portability is built right in. Authentication is built in. Using the google phone, you can even pop up the user on google maps, send directions, etc. Promotional videos, training videos, whatever, are all served up on YouTube, with the rights management tied into the 'Google Business Application Server'. Salespeople will love it, management will love it, and most of all investors will love it. The only ones who won't love it, are the telcos, and the companies that serve up office software and e-mail servers.
Those companies start bitching about Google becoming the next Microsoft. The big Telcos fight back, and start their tiered internet, limiting bandwidth to Google. Google lights up their own fiber like the fourth of July, and cuts the big Telcos out. They had their chance to play nice, and they didn't. Now it's hardball time. Google, in trying to provide everything to everyone at as small of a cost as possible, essentially usurped Microsoft, penis-whacked AT&T, and pwn3d the entire Internet, all in one brilliant strategy. With everyone having a G-pay account now, the banks either bend to Google's will, or get cut out like the telcos.
At least, that's what I'd do, and that's probably why they were so interested in the 700mHz spectrum.
(Sorry about the incoherent rambling, I'll take my pills now)
I did pay for having skype out, worked out perfectly, $25 for a year and can call out as much as I want to countries beyond USA/Canada. I have been quite satisfied with that service, however I was thinking I would have Skype-in too, however their price was not what I had in mind for that, and I found another service offering a phone number for where I live and unlimited reception of calls for $5-6 a month...
Skype only really works for me to call other Skype users. I tried to use Skype as a regular phone, but dropped the account when it failed miserably. I had two problems:
I can't call the IBM pukes that I have working for me. That's because Skype doesn't allow Skype-out service to some area codes, and that includes the IBM conference calling center in Missouri.
And, the Skype client doesn't support DTMF tones properly. That pretty much eliminates Skype for everything except calling your mistress on her home phone. You can't get through any kind of voicemail or call answering touch tone menu without DTMF support.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
SIP stands for Session Initiation Protocol and actually is not the transport protocol for the audio/video streams nor has anything to do with the audio codec being used. This means that SIP has nothing to do with your call quality and your comment is actually quite misleading.
are SIP or jingle (xmpp) based. since i there doesn't seem to be a stable jingle client (yeah coccinella, but it is ugly), i bet on SIP. gtalk doesn't count btw (win only, tightly google integrated).
and now tell me of the dozens of cross-platform (!) SIP programs you know. i am searching myself right now and only found wengophone [1] as a reasonable alternative.
please name the "more than enough" alternatives; i don't know them.
[1] http://wengophone.com/
After all, it is not impossible for ebay to use skype effectively even if skype is not profitable independently. Just imagine,
1) assign a free skype account for each buyer or seller (match skype id to ebay id?)
2) add a voice message feature to My Ebay (maybe, record conversations as well?)
3) associate voice messages/conversations to transactions
4) resolve disputes with voice messages/conversations
5) how about a little fee for such a convenient service in order to safe-guard the interests of both buyers' and sellers'.
Well, I may pay a few $$ for this additional 'insurance' for a transaction of a few hundred $$.
^(oo)^pig~
bought yesterday for just $8.1 Billion
That is the sound of the internet bubble version 2.1.5-rc-5 bursting.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I love skype, but signing up for its pay services is more complicated than it needs to be. At one point I considered dumping my VOIP phone and using skype for calls and voicemail, but it turned out to be more hassle than just keeping my VOIP phone. The problem is that call-out capability, call-in capability, voicemail, etc., are all essentially different products with different terms, cost and billing. While I appreciate the flexibility such an a la carte approach offers, I did find it somewhat of a hassle and kind of confusing. Why not have a single plan you pay for all at once? Also, prepaying for calls is a little weird - not sure if they give the option of monthly billing for calls like every other phone-type company, but they should.
If they streamlined and simplified things, they might be able to get more business, perhaps even by the average joe.
Unless you need 10+ people on voice chat, Skype is the single best voice chat program available. Voice quality ranges from FM- to CD-quality, is lossless, and takes considerably less setup time (not to mention, no server costs). Yes, it's a bit of a memory pig, reporting 35,000K in Task Manager (Vista Ultimate 64-bit), but if you have the horsepower for the OS, then Skype's not a problem.
I use VoIP a lot, since I'm living in a foreign country and regularly talk to my family by calling them on their fixed phone. Skype has expensive rates compared to at least one other quality VoIP operator, VoipCheap... You get 90 days of free calls to fixed phones once you make a deposit, and after those 90 days the rates are better than Skype so... who cares about Skype except for PC-to-PC calls?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
I predict that within a year, Skype will be no more.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Skype is over-hyped imho. In an environment we look after, the users frequently use Skype to call their colleagues. That is, until I pointed out how much bandwidth Skype eats up - up to 1.5 GB/day on some clients - even when they're not using it (but logged in). A P2P app in a production, executive environment? heh - not. It just adds complexity where there need not be. Just pick up the damn phone.
I tried to use Skype in. The number they gave me wasn't in my LATA. I couldn't get anyone to respond at Skype to help resolve this issue, so I paid for a year of service that was useless to me. I use skype out on a regular basis, to talk to a friend who moved to Russia for a few years. On two occasions, my Skype Out credit, nearly $20 worth each time) vanished for no apparent reason (it doesn't seem to have been stolen, since there were no logged Skype Out calls using it up, it seems to have been a system glitch of some kind). I received responses from Skype email technical support, but they clearly didn't understand the problem and didn't care to resolve it.
At first this really annoyed me. Then I realized that if AT&T (or any regular telco) had done this to me, I could have complained to the public service commission and went several rounds with yet another front line support person who doesn't understand the problem and just replies with an email that says effectively, "AT&T says it didn't happen. Case closed." At least I would have had a reason to vote against an incumbent somewhere.
So, with Skype, the service quality is crap, the customer support is crap, there is no recourse, but it's cheaper than water. With AT&T the service quality is excellent, there appears to be functioning customer support which sometimes results in a problem resolution, there is recourse to a public oversight agency that is a useless pile of crap, but it's frightfully expensive.
Pick your poison. Six of one. *** Your favorite appropriate cliche here ***
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
If MS can't find it profitable, ebay won't either.
I've had such bad experiencs with eBay, and PayPal since eBay bought PayPal, that I refuse to use Skype or any eBay property so long as they are owned by eBay. They produce bad technology and their busienss tactics are slimey - I don't need any more of that in my life.
I'll consider using Skype, PayPal, etc again when they are no longer owned by those eBay nazis.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
This actually would have been a great idea for eBay at 2.6 million, probably even 26 million. eBay fell into the "it's only paper money anyway" trap, I suspect.
Using Skype Pro with Skype Out, I have paid around $70 USD for unlimited long distance service in the US and Canada for the WHOLE YEAR. I also purchased a Linksys CIT400 phone which makes using Skype without a computer completely idiot proof. I paid $100 for the phone. That means for $14 per month for the first year (and less than $5 per month every year after that) I can use the phone as much as I want, barring 911 calls (I will use my cell for this if the occasion arises). On a side note -- I got my grandmother, who is 86 years old, using the CIT400 to call her 90 year old sister for free with no problems. She doesn't even know (or care) that she is using VOIP. I think ebay needs to hire some people who actually understand the technology and what can be done with it to market Skype. Skype works and it works well. I will continue to pay for Skype Pro and Skype Out because I feel that they are perfect compliments to my cell phone. If they can not figure out how to make money on it, they should hire me and put me in charge of marketing the product. I am sure I can do a better job than they are.
> The only way that Skype makes money from its subscribers is when people use its Skype-In or Skype-Out services
that's nice.
as an Irish user of Skype, I'd like to use Skype's "Skype-in" and "Skype-out" services, thereby providing income to Skype and decreasing my normal phone bill.
what? Skype don't provide Skype-in or Skype-out for Ireland? an oversight, maybe - maybe they don't think Irish money is real.
I wonder how many other countries they've ignored because their currencies are not real.
... they might have an asset that was worth more.
I bought SkypeOut and one SkypeIn line for my business, costing about $25 for the year ($14 for a SkypeIn telno and $10 for Out calls and forwarding @ 2c/min). After some evaluation, my assessment was that it would be Good Enough(tm), and certainly better than paying Verizon's $80+ per month for another fixed line. I have not yet made a single Skype-Skype call.
The best asset of Skype for me is the architecture. My Skype service can be located wherever I am attached to the 'net at the moment. I can pick up the biz line at my home office or at the shop-office, or even most places when I am travelling. I can also use either my PC, laptop, or the handset/base station. I am really looking forward to the WiFi phones to be ready for prime time.
The quality has been generally acceptable, at least from here in the Northeast US. The main problems have been with DTMF, which fails about 5% of the time, and on calls forwarded to my cell phone, on which I have to call back almost half the time. Over the last 10 months that I've used it, both of these have gotten noticeably better. But this improvement isn't enough to completely commit as a biz user, or to completely drop my home phone line.
The big feature that is lacking is outgoing Caller ID. I often have to call customers and vendors on their cell phones, and most of them check CallerID first, so it is not good to show up as 'unknown' or '000-012-3456'. With good ID, and another significant step in quality, I'd switch to Skype for all land-line type services at home and biz.
I'd like to see eBay put in the investment for the next quality improvement, and for good CallerID. With that, I think they'd have a lot of people switching.
Of course, if they start trying to push adverts through the service, they can just watch everyone go away.
Skype blew quite a few opportunities.
Due to technical glitches (contact list lost, etc), it did not build customer confidence nearly as well as it could have. I am on my second Skype ID (the first one had its contact list erased twice), and as such, not willing to put up money up front on skype in/out.
Also, they did not go at all after corporate customers. I'd love my university to have Skype officialy, and just be able to type the name of the person I want and boom, I talk to them. But no, there has been NO marketing of this that I have been aware of. So in the end I can talk only to my friends, because no staff/etc has Skype IDs.
Basically, I think Skype had great potential, but I think that that potential has been in great part wasted by a lack of marketing push, lack of innovation, and lack of stability.
I've been looking at getting a new cell phone because I'm coming up on the end of my three-year contract with The Devil. I was looking at getting a smartphone with wifi built in so that I could use skype whenever I was near a hotspot. Asides from the fact that nearly all the good smartphones are GSM ( I want a CDMA phone because that's what the good service provider in my area uses ), here in Canada I can't sign up for a Skype-In number. We've got Skype-Out, just no Skype-In. I also checked out Gizmo, and they have numbers setup for Gizmo-In ( or whatever they call it ). But they only have four or five area codes, and those are all in the Toronto area ( and I live in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia ).
Damn.
God is dead -- Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead -- God
Zombie Nietzsche lives! -- Zombie Nietzsche
I really like Skype, it's the only multi-platform video/voice chat service available, and the Skype out isn't so bad either.
President/CEO Pacy World http://www.pacyworld.com
I wonder what Ebay plans to do with their acquisition of Stumbleupon from May.
"Follow me" the wise man said, but he walked behind.
Of course I use Skype-to-Skype pretty much constantly when I'm home (at least 5 hours a weeknight, at least 16 hours a weekend). I depend on skype. And what do I do if the other party's computer isn't working? I'll just call their regular phone with Skype. The Skype-to-Skype calls are the core of the business. They build loyalty. When I started using Skype, I was very weary of paying for any part of the service. After using it once, though, I found myself buying more credit by the end of the week.
The point is: I would have never bothered with the pay-for service if I wasn't already using it for free calls. I'm now looking for a job overseas and am considering getting a Skype-in number to forward to my cell phone and list on my resume. I certainly wouldn't have thought of that if I wasn't already using it every day "for free".
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
It's so hot out! Skype was a bad choice.
buying skype for a huge sum of money looked suspicious in the first place. now it becomes even more clear that decision to buy a small voip company for $2.6b was not a recipe for commercial success, but a smart move to introduce government surveillance into it. poor ebay shareholders - they are the ones that had to pay for it!
Maybe they should buy Netscape, Winamp, and ICQ too...
Everyone with a clue saw this a mile away, and whomever owns stock in eBay surely must all be *idiots* for not doing something (or sell fast has hell).
Oh, and btw, you can get the same service with VoIP and a bunch of other technologies. Heck, iChat out of the box gives me better long distance internet calling (quality wise).
The only question I have is where are all the idiots? I want to sell them my navel lint for a million bucks...
I use skype to frequently call my other relatives on skype using a USB B2K converter box for my cordless telephone. I would gladly use skype-in and skype-out and drop verizon in a heartbeat except for the fact that skype doesn't offer 911 location services on the skype-out service.
Things are already quite interesting if she has a way of showing you, well, anything over POTS.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Having lived and done biz in Sililcon Valley, I can confirm (as I am sure can many readers of this fine forum) that a large number of large deals, acquisitions etc come about for the following two reasons: a) To prevent a potential competitor from moving first. b) Ego. I won't dwell on b), but if anyone reading this has spent any amount of time with the wealthy or those who may feel in a position of power through wealth, you will know what I am talking about. Of course, there are viable strategic acquisitions, such as licensing or purchasing a patented technology, such as Sony's licensing of Faruja line doubling technology, but a good 50% are an ego trip or item a). If eBay imagined people would call up their trading partner using Skype, they had another thing coming. Why? Because in real life, people interact with multiple buyers/sellers and so cannot possibly chat with everyone. Why? Time zones! The reason email and sending messages (such as using Facebook etc) is is because you don't need to be 'awake' at the time of the communication, something you do need to be with VoYPE. Anyway, personally, I much prefer to just pick up the phone. Better call quality, no lost connections, and I can crash on the sofa while talking... :-)
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Wesley's experiment went wrong.
Now you know why there's only 104 people in the world.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I'm in a distance relationship (yeah yeah, cue the lame jokes about slashdotters not having relationships. Oh, and yes we've met in person I just haven't yet found work in her area to move permanently). Both my GF and I have subscriptions to the skype PC->phone service, which means that we can call each other so long as one of us is near a PC. When we're both at home, we just use skype-to-skype since the audio quality is better (in fact, often better than phone-to-phone).
Since I bought into mine last year during the special, I think it was all of $15CAD to subscribe. Given the amount I use the service and the savings I've made on long-distance calling cards, as well as cellphone bills (free incoming, yay) I'd say that it's been a very worthwhile investment. I'm hoping they'll have another special offer around New Years for the same price, but if it were twice that it would still be a deal for me.
In line with other tools for geeks in relationships over distance, those interested might want to check out goodies like SNES9x (you can play old-school SNES games together), and VLC (with a good enough connection/PC, you can broadcast a movie over the 'net so you can watch shows together). It's not quite the same as being together and snuggling, but so far it's helped our relationship keep in touch and thus survive until I can find work and move to Toronto [shameless plug]Hire me[/shameless plug]
I almost put this exact recommendation in my post. Then I found it already exists:
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
I use VOIP avidly, but I studiously avoid Skype. The reason is pretty straight forward. For the cost of Skype-out services I can use an Australian VOIP provider that charges less than half as much.
Skype to Skype is great, but it only works well in countries with reliable, fast internet connections. These countries are overwhelmingly in Western Europe, North America and Australasia (plus a large chunk of East Asia).
I can already call any of these places for less than a cent a minute from my Australian VOIP provider. Countries that are expensive to call using VOIP (I make plenty of calls to East Africa and the Pacific) are places that still have most users on dial-up.
So to re-cap, Skype is pretty much useless for me, because where it works it is uncompetitive, and where it would be competitive, it doesn't work.
If the pattern goes 9am, 10am, 11am, why isn't noon 12am?
It's basically a router... and an AppleTV. It is optimized for low power consumption and has an unused SATA port for an extra hard drive. It isn't hobbled so it can run OSX programs like bittorrent, which can be controlled remotely through something like a nice web interface. But here's the killer feature: It's this thing's remote control. This remote is rather big, because it has a nice LCD. In communicates with the base station through Bluetooth, and has a nice interface for scrolling through media files tht live on the network. That in itself would be awesome: to be able to easily play my whole music collection on my fancy living room stereo, controlled by a nice remote from my couch.
But here's the real killer feature: Skype.
You see, the remote control would have a speaker and a little microphone, and it would ring. It would do Skype. You could dial with it like with a phone, you can skype-to-skype with it, and it would feel like a normal phone. Skype desparately needs that. The whole headphones+microphone thing makes Skype look lame.
So yeah, listen device manufacturers: The killer living room convergence device should not require me to turn on the TV to work the interface. Maybe I just want to play some music! Of course, to do that I need to be able to browse through my network, and that's why the remote needs to have a decent little LCD. But if you're going to have a remote that smart, it might as well do Skype also. This is what the AppleTV should have been, maybe still could be, if Jobs didn't have such a fetish about removing as many buttons as possible.
Wow, sounds a lot like Geocities, Broadcast.com, and Blue Mountain. Why do internet companies not learn from their mistakes? On the bright side, the next time I come up with some cool idea with absolutely no hope of a business model, I'll just sell it to yahoo or something.
The information in Facebook is alone worth billions to a company such as Google. I reckon Google is drooling over Facebook, but realize that if they bought it they'd lose a lot of good will when they started to use that information for e.g. targeted ads and so on. Or maybe they will buy it and there'll only be some obscure critisism on Slashdot but mostly unheard of in the mainstream media...
..) and so on and so forth.
Think about it.. they not only know who you email.. your typical activities via their calendar service.. what you search for using their search engine. Now they could know your true friends, how you know them (where you met, via another friend, work, and so on). Where you've been in the world (common application in Facebook lets you pinpoint locations you've been at), what you like (taste in movies, music, looks,
In fact.. it carries so much information its downright scary. I still use it though, despite my paranoia.
Fight for your digital freedom, join the EFF *now*: http://www.eff.org/support/
I use to use skype out a lot then I moved to install my own asterisk server. Long distance calls are much cheaper now, 1 cent a minute compared to 5 with skype out. I can connect to my server through the internet and the call quality is superior to skype, it matches PSTN quality.
I just wander how many skype users have moved to asterisk or other cheaper VOIP solutions. It might have contributed to skype downfall, http://www.asterisk.org/
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Which leaves them with a payout of $530 millions dollars. cash. poor bastards.
I recently moved to another country for studies. I always knew that I can call home with Skype quite cheaply, but I did not know how easily and cheaply I can allow my locals to call me with their local cost and I can answer their calls in here with my cellphone and paying only local tarif for it, using combination of SkypeIn and call-forwarding.
For some reason, very few of the other international students who I know, knew Skype and that they can call home with that and nobody knew that it is possible for others to call them like that. When I told them about this, I can say that ~20 students were holding their heads and registered for a SkypeIn number.
And I knew these benefits(SkypeIn and call-forwarding) only because my friend who works at Skype, told me about them.
So Skype really needs to work on getting the word to the right people.
"I refuse to use Skype or any eBay property so long as they are owned by eBay."
That's how I feel, also. There are some companies that want customers to accept abuse, in my opinion eBay is one of them, and I don't accept that.
I'm not rigid about it. I de-emphasize abusive companies, but continue to deal with them if not dealing with them would be a bigger problem.
Those who have a virtual monopoly seem to believe they can do anything they want to their customers.
BroadVoice offers 35 countries for $28 per month.
Could it be that Skype isn't compatible with anything else? VoIP is booming, at least between devices and software that use open documented standards and are interoperable with each other (Asterisk, SIP ATA's and phones, SIP/IAX service providers). Not to mention they dont depend on a PeeCee with a soundcard to use.
Not to mention you can often get *free* outbound to PSTN (well, you pay flat-per-month rather than per-minute)
Skype was a curiousity at best, but was always destined to be a loser.
Well, his work number is 353-2398. That's in Portsmouth, OH, so the area code would be (740). Say hi for me!