Disruptive Telephony

And so begins the next chapter of Skype... first it was a scruffy little startup taking on the telecom world... then it became somewhat bizarrely part of eBay... then it went back to a private company owned primarily by Silver Lake Partners... and then... to the utter amazement of so many of us... Skype announced it would be acquired by Microsoft!

And today that acquisition is official. Microsoft announced in a news release and Skype announced in a blog post and video from CEO Tony Bates that the acquisition has formally been concluded.

The deal is done. Skype CEO Tony Bates is now the president of the Skype Dvision within Microsoft reporting directly to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. I found this phrase of the news release to be interesting (my emphasis added):

Microsoft and Skype will remain focused on their shared goal of connecting all people across all devices and accelerating both companies’ efforts to transform real-time communications for consumers and enterprise customers.

My interest was not only in the "across all devices", which has been a large part of Skype's goal for some time... but also in the use of "real-time communications". For a while that was a phrase that only the more technical-minded folks used, but now increasingly "real-time communications" seems to be the phrase of choice for many. I, for one, applaud the usage.

Skype and Microsoft also apparently wanted to be hype-compliant and so they released an infographic with recent stats about Skype. (Everyone seems to need to have an infographic these days, don't they?)

I admit to a degree of sadness that Skype is no longer the independent company that they were. They were always "fun" as a company because they were such the "outsider" that attacked the entrenched telecommunications industry - and succeeded in so massively disrupting the industry!

They've been fun to watch... and a constant source of stories to write about for those of us chronicling the changing communication industry. Somehow I don't think they'll be quite as "fun" or "wacky" as part of such a megalithic company as Microsoft.

Yet maybe that's okay.

Skype's reached a point in its growth where it has disrupted so much of telecom... and it has in fact become a critical communication tool for so many.

On one level they will now have the large-scale support they need, both from a financial point-of-view but also from a "systems" point-of-view. Microsoft does understand the needs of enterprise customers. I would think they will improve the support options... and improve the security reporting features.

Heck, maybe they'll actually put a phone number on Skype's website so that people will stop calling ME! (People still do... had two calls last week.)

More than that, though, Microsoft will give Skype a platform upon which to move into the enterprise. Not only in the potential integration with Microsoft Lync, but just in the "legitimacy" brought about by being part of "Microsoft". Skype is no longer some scrappy little outlaw-or-barely-legal company from somewhere in Eastern Europe who should be dismissed and blocked by IT departments everywhere.

Skype is now a Microsoft product. (with the associated microsoft.com product pages)

Enterprise IT departments understand, support and use Microsoft products... and so Skype may no longer be as dismissed and blocked as it has been. We'll have to see... but the name does help Skype overcome some of those issues.

Microsoft also has its wide array of other products and services... Lync, XBox, Office, Office 365, etc. So many places where Skype could be further integrated.

It will be intriguing to see where the "Skype Division of Microsoft" goes now. I'm pleased for my friends there that the acquisition has closed so that they have at least some degree of certainty of what is happening next. Kudos to all involved in making the acquisition a reality.

Now let's see what happens in the next chapter of the story of Skype...

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UPDATE: Jim Courtney has a good post up, too: Microsoft Acquires Skype: Deal Closed!

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To I think no one's real surprise, the European Union today gave the go-ahead to Microsoft's acquisition of Skype. Given that the US Federal Trade Commission okayed the deal back in June, there should be no further barriers to the deal. Microsoft issued a very short statement:

We’re pleased that the European Commission has approved Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype. This is an important milestone, as we’ve now received clearance from both the United States and the European Union. We look forward to completing soon the final steps needed to close the acquisition, bringing together the employees of Microsoft and Skype, and creating new opportunities for people to communicate and collaborate around the world.

Jim Courtney took a look at the actual text of the EU ruling and in his post dissects how the commission viewed the consumer versus enterprise space with regard to competion - and how it reached the conclusion that it would be okay for Microsoft to acquire Skype.

For the sake of my friends working at Skype who have been hanging in an uncomfortable limbo while all this gets sorted out, I do hope that the acquisition can now proceed quickly. As Mary-Jo Foley notes, Microsoft has already been working on how Skype fits into the larger world of Microsoft, so hopefully we'll start seeing those actions start moving ahead soon.

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Given that last week I received two more phone calls from people looking to speak with Skype, I was very pleased to learn that Skype has recently started providing a support channel via Twitter - @SkypeSupport. Sure, it's not a phone line - which probably means I'll still be Skype's unofficial receptionist, but at least now I have another channel to send people to in addition to Skype's community forums.

Great to see Skype providing this channel to support customers.

P.S. Jim Courtney noted last month on his site that Skype also now has a Facebook page for customer support as well

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It was 8 years ago today that the first public beta version of Skype was released... and so began the amazing journey of a product/service that has truly disrupted the telecommunications industry. The Wikipedia page on Skype has a good record of the history, which is interesting to look back upon now.

I started using Skype sometime in early 2005 or so... working in Mitel's Office of the CTO charged with evaluating new technology - and seeking to understand what Skype was all about. I started writing about Skype then... and still continue writing a good bit about Skype as it is certainly one of the more disruptive players in the industry. Skype today is a HUGE part of my daily life and truly is one service that is integral to my daily workflow and life online.

Skype's blog post today, of course, focuses on their current fixation on video calls... even including the strange text (my emphasis added):

What started off as a little idea to connect the world over video calls has turned into something so much more, and we believe this is making a huge difference in making the world feel smaller and a lot more connected.

I don't actually know the ideas of the original founders of Skype, but I do know that in the actual early days of Skype it was all about audio versus video. Perhaps they had the grand dream then of video and had to focus on the reality of audio... or perhaps this is just the current Skype marketing trying to focus on their current messaging around video.

From my perspective, the 8 years of Skype thus far have:

• completely destroyed the expensive costs of international telephony;
• provided people a real viable option to use video telephony;
• introduced people to the idea that you could have audio calls that sounded FAR better than the PSTN via wideband audio codecs;
• gave people a true multi-modal "unified communications" experience with the ability to easily migrate between chat, audio, video, file sharing and screen sharing;
• provided the industry with a solid example of secure communications using SRTP (while the carriers were whining about how they couldn't use SRTP because it would be too demanding on their infrastructure);
• provided an incredible example of the power of persistent group chats;
• provided an example of what a simple and easy user experience could be in a world of cluttered interfaces; (although some may argue that ended with Skype 5.x)
• gave we who are fascinated by networks and amazing example of a peer-to-peer communications system; and
• provided an example of a product that can "just work" from behind pretty much any network configuration including layers of NAT, firewalls, etc., etc.

... and so much more. It's been a fascinating service and company to watch, write about and use their products.

Oh, it hasn't all be great, of course... the business side of Skype has been all over the place. The partner/developer programs are on their 7th or 8th iteration. Various other programs have come and gone (SkypeCasts? Extras?). Skype has pursued it's incredibly fractured product management strategy across the multiple different operating systems.

But all in all it has certainly been fun to have Skype around ... and it sure has disrupted the industry!

What lies ahead now that Skype is slated to become part of Microsoft? Much remains to be seen... but odds that when their 9th birthday rolls around they won't be quite the same disruptive troublemakers that they are today. We'll see.

Meanwhile... Happy Birthday, Skype!

And two other friends have shared their thoughts today:

• Jim Courtney, Voice on the Web: Happy 8th Birthday Skype
  
  
• Phil Wolff, Skype Journal: Happy 8th Birthday, Skype! Many happy returns.

And here is Skype's birthday video... slickly produced with a message that does indeed celebrate the communications power that Skype has brought to our world:

I'm looking forward to seeing where the next 8 years of Skype takes us...

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Are you a Mac OS X user trying to learn to live with the new Skype 5.x user interface? Would you like to learn some great shortcuts for working faster with Skype 5?

While the Skype 5.x interface has certainly come under fire from many folks (including me), the reality is that it is the direction Skype is going forward with and so to a certain degree we who want to continue to use Skype have to either learn to live with the new UI - or revert back to Skype 2.8 while realizing we won't get any new features.

Recently my corporate laptop was upgraded to a brand new MacBook Pro and in the process I decided to finally make the jump over to Skype 5.2. In doing so, I started hunting around for ways to work even faster with the user interface. Thankfully, the folks at Skype came out with this great list of 12 tips:

Skype 5.2 tricks and tips

It turned out I knew most of them (or other ways to do them), but the one I have found very useful was the three-finger swipe on the trackpad to move up or down between conversations.

And the 13th tip?

That would be my own that isn't on that page. Being a huge Skype chat user, I like to quickly be able to find and jump into various chats. While in the Skype UI, hold down:

Option + Command + f

Your focus will jump up to the search box in the upper right corner and you can type in the name of someone or some text that is in a chat name. You should see the search results start to appear below. Hit the tab key to move down to the list of search results and then the arrow keys to move up and down in the list. Hit Enter to go into the chat ... and there you are.

Simple way to find chats... without having to use the trackpad. It's a shortcut that I use pretty much every day!

Are any of these tips major time savers for you? Have you found other tips or tricks that help make the Skype 5.2 UI work better for you?

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Did Skype just add a XMPP gateway into their network and bring their walls down a bit more? Today's release of Skype 5.5 for Windows had one VERY cool piece of news:

Facebook integration
Now when you connect to Facebook you can see when your Facebook friends are online and IM with them directly from Skype.

Now I don't have Windows to test it out (as you would know from my earlier post), but in working with fellow blogger Jim Courtney who uses Skype on both operating systems, this has some interesting aspects to it.

For starters, in Skype 5.5, the chat with the Facebook user appears in your left-side list of chats just like a chat with a Skype user. You have the same user experience chatting with a FB user as with a Skype user. (Subject to the caveat that Jim found he couldn't edit a message sent to a FB user, but that makes sense given that the message would leave Skype's network to go over to Facebook's network.)

When Jim went into his Facebook contacts he found my name (he and I are friends on FB) that I was currently "offline":

He noted that he could call me via a regular phone number... but not through Skype, even though we are connected on Skype. (So a bit of future integration work that could be done.)

Once I opened a browser and logged into Facebook, I showed up to Jim as online:

Jim initiated a chat... and to me it seemed to be just like a regular Facebook chat:

On Jim's side, it looked like just a regular Skype chat.

This is VERY cool!

Why? Because this is really the first direct integration I am aware of between Skype and any other IM service. Sure, there are any number of services that people have connected to Skype to bridge Skype messages out to XMPP/Jabber or other networks... but they aren't directly supported by Skype and in my experience some of them haven't worked too well.

Now, I don't know how Skype actually accomplished the Facebook chat integration. I do know that Facebook supports XMPP (Jabber) for connections to external services for chat, so this would be one very obvious way for Skype to make the connection to Facebook. They might have done the integration at a deeper level. I don't know.

But if Skype did add an XMPP gateway to the edge of their network... that's great news... and perhaps may bode well for future integration with other IM services.

Skype 5.5 for Windows has a bunch of other updates, including those emoticons I ranted about, and if you are a Windows user I would suggest you look at upgrading.

Meanwhile, even if it is only on one platform, kudos to the folks at Skype for lowering the walls a bit and connecting out to the other IM networks!

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Skype is very excited about rolling out new emoticons today... but continuing their fragmented product strategy, these new emoticons are Windows-only. So while on a Windows system they may look like (image from Skype's blog post):

What they look like on my Mac is this:

C'mon Skype... would it have killed you to make this available in a simultaneous Mac release?

I don't personally really care about access to these emoticons... my life will not be any better or worse based on whether or not I can use these emoticons (although I do see places where I could use them).

The point is that Skype once again continues to roll out features that work on one operating system but not on others.

Personally, I'd love to see Skype get to a point where it could be like Mozilla Firefox (or Voxeo's Prophecy) where a new release comes out across all operating systems.

Let's break the silos, Skype... and provide a more consistent user experience across ALL platforms!

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Three+ weeks ago on June 24th, we were all buzzing about the Skype for iPad app that was rumored. I linked to a video from MacRumors which looked quite cool. There were numerous posts saying that the Skype for iPad app was "imminent" in the Apple AppStore. Others said it was coming the next Tuesday (3 weeks ago tomorrow).

And after all the buzz... where is it?

Nowhere.

At least, it's not in the AppStore, as of just a couple of minutes ago.

Where is the hang-up, one wonders... delays on Apple's end? on Skype's end? Where?

Regardless, the net of it is that we iPad users are all left out here... wondering...

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UPDATE: I've had multiple confirmations that this rumor about Skype for iPad is true... and CNET is running a story with screenshots that indicates Skype for iPad will be available in the AppStore on Tuesday.

UPDATE #2: There are a number of other stories now appearing up on Techmeme confirming the rumor.

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If this video, reported by MacRumors, is true, this would truly ROCK! I hardly ever use Skype on my iPad2, because the iPhone app just doesn't work all that well on the iPad.

When is this coming, Skype? We want it! :-)

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Over the past couple of weeks, those of us watching Skype have become increasingly puzzled by the whack of terminations of senior executives at Skype. David Gurlé, a very public face of Skype, was perhaps the most prominent departure for those of us in the VoIP/telecom space, but the list includes a good number of prominent folks (source:Skype Journal):

• David Gurlé, VP and General Manager of Skype for Business
• Doug Bewsher, Chief Marketing Officer
• Anne Gillespie, Global HR Director
• Russ Shaw, VP and General Manager (focused on telecom)
• Don Albert, VP and General Manager for Americas and Advertising
• Christopher Dean, Head of Consumer Market Business Development
• Ramu Sunkara, Executive VP for Carrier Relations for Qik
• Allyson Campa, Senior VP for Marketing for Qik

Why? And why now?

Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal started writing about the issue last week and is out today with a longer post today, "Why did Skype fire 8 execs? Why them? Why now?", where he dives into potential reasons at great depth.

His primary suggestion is "Microsoft has better teams/talent in those departments" although he also has an interesting theory around a potential for buy-back of stock by investors.

Business Week also weighed in on the story with the suggestion that this is a move to save money on payouts to execs when the Microsoft acquisition occurs:

The timing of the dismissals means stock options will be worth less than if the executives stayed until the closing of the $8.5 billion deal, the people said.

However, I have to think that execs at this level would have the appropriate clauses in their contracts to still receive their payouts when an acquisition occurs.

I'm most inclined to agree with Phil's view on "realignment" before the acquistion.

The reality is that Skype staffed up to go through a public IPO.

They built their organization - and executive team - to create the kind of growth that would drive an organization to the point of a successful IPO. They staffed up to reach out into business and the enterprise. They staffed up to build out a global organization.

All of that no longer has the same urgency it once did now that the Microsoft acquisition of Skype has been approved. As Phil notes, Microsoft already has a ton of people in the other parts of the huge MS organization who could potentially cover the work of these execs.

Still, while these terminations may be an "expected" part of an acquisition, these were some very talented folks let go by Skype... I wish them all the best with whatever comes next for them.

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