As they note, Skype is hiring!

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This week Skype 5.0 for Mac OS X left the “Beta” label behind and was released as a production product. I naturally downloaded it onto the iMac where I’m running Skype 5.0… and found that while some changes were made (and some very good changes, I should add), it’s still a very different user experience from Skype 2.8 and one I’m still not sure about.

I did my usual test call with Jim Courtney, took a good number of screenshots and will write up some thoughts after using it a bit more.

Meanwhile, Jim’s out with his thoughts on the technical side:

Skype for Mac 5.0 Goes Gold: Incorporating Beta Feedback and More

While Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal took a different tack and wrote about the sentiment from Mac users about this new release:

Download: Skype for Mac 5.0 Gold

As Phil notes, the Skype community forums do have areas filled with disgruntled Mac users who are upset that Skype didn’t go far enough in incorporating their feedback.

I still need to work with it a bit more before I jump to that level… but I am glad to see that Skype incorporated some of the feedback. More…

Yesterday, the Mozilla team took the rather drastic step of adding the Skype Toolbar to their “Firefox Blocklist” so that the toolbar is disabled by default (with the user being notified and having the option to re-enable it). Mozilla’s reasoning is rather straightforward:

The current shipping version of the Skype Toolbar is one of the top crashers of Mozilla Firefox 3.6.13, and was involved in almost 40,000 crashes of Firefox last week. Additionally, depending on the version of the Skype Toolbar you’re using, the methods it uses to detect and re-render phone numbers can make DOM manipulation up to 300 times slower, which drastically affects the page rendering times of a large percentage of web content served today

Yikes! If it’s causing that many crashes, I completely understand their rationale.

What’s interesting about this, of course, is that it shows the linkages beyond simply VoIP and communication into the larger ecosystem of applications. Here you have a web browser add-on for a communication product which is then slowing down or crashing the web browser product.

In this brave new world of Unified Communications, or whatever we want to call it, the apps are all linked together… which creates both benefits…

The Financial Times is out this morning with an article about Skype CEO Tony Bates and his plan to hire around 400 more people this year. The article offers some insight into his thinking, and included this piece related to encouraging more business usage:

Mr Bates said he is considering offering the so-called Service Level Agreements that most companies require from their suppliers to assure a guaranteed quality of service, and adding new services for businesses.

The creation of SLAs would be interesting to see, given Skype’s P2P nature, which I’ve explained previously particularly with regard to their recent outage. Not quite sure how they’d do it, unless they perhaps create a part of the P2P cloud that has Skype-operated supernodes and a version of the Skype client software that defaults to connecting to that part of the larger Skype cloud.

In any event, the FT article makes for interesting reading to get a bit of glimpse into the thoughts of Skype’s new CEO.

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