I agree with your sentiment. I am a US military member, stationed overseas. Phone cards here run about 11 cents per minute to the US, while Skype calls are the roughly-two-cents per minute rate. You can see the obvious savings.
In addition, I am aircrew on C-130s, so I travel throughout the Pacific. With Skype I don't need to deal with the hassle of local access numbers or phone cards that don't work in certain countries. Since I bring my laptop with me everywhere and high-speed internet access is prevalent in virtually every major metropolitan area, Skype works for me.
What I'm getting at here is that Skype, while probably not the best system from a purely technological perspective, is still a very good solution for some specific purposes, like mine. And let's face it. Joe Schmoe will not care about interoperability. He will care about cheap.
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I agree with your sentiment. I am a US military member, stationed overseas. Phone cards here run about 11 cents per minute to the US, while Skype calls are the roughly-two-cents per minute rate. You can see the obvious savings.
In addition, I am aircrew on C-130s, so I travel throughout the Pacific. With Skype I don't need to deal with the hassle of local access numbers or phone cards that don't work in certain countries. Since I bring my laptop with me everywhere and high-speed internet access is prevalent in virtually every major metropolitan area, Skype works for me.
What I'm getting at here is that Skype, while probably not the best system from a purely technological perspective, is still a very good solution for some specific purposes, like mine. And let's face it. Joe Schmoe will not care about interoperability. He will care about cheap.