The last time I was impacted by a Skype outage I was in Europe on a train heading to Paris from Milan in the middle of a massive snowstorm in December, 2010. Lots of news coverage about it back then, as it was a core meltdown.
Yesterday Skype had a redux, though not as massive and not as far reaching, that impacted a series of functions, most of all signing in and in my case, with Skype In. While Skype to Skype calls were functioning without any issues, calls to any of my five Skype In numbers simply went to the very impersonal voice mail that Skype offers, and were eventually delivered hours later. So much for Skype having any redundancy and so much for the Enterprise customers they so much want in their corner. All the work the Skype Enterprise team is doing is being self-sabotaged by the lack of redundancy and these pesky outages.
Fortunately, my GoogleVoice forwards to a Skype In number so calls still went elsewhere, but if I relied only on Skype In to hear from people not on Skype, I would have missed a bunch of calls.
On top of the outage, Mac users seem to be ganging up on Skype too about the dreadful interface they released with version 5 of Skype for Mac. Two blosgs, Ignore the Code and one from former Skyper Jaanus Kase, pretty much sums up what many users have been saying since 5.0 came out. And it's riveting.
The back-story is that Skype's former CEO, Josh Silverman pushed the Skype development team into making Skype for Mac a more Windows like experience.
Josh was and may still be a Windows guy, and he couldn't get his head around the Mac I'm told. That led to what we have now...and led Josh to receive a reported multi-million dollar golden parachute. Regardless if it was Silverman's doing or not, the current 5.0 Skype for Mac is at best an abortion, and at worst an atrocity. I hear that Skype's current team is taking a hard look at this, but between the outages and the interface issues on Mac, plus the need to drive revenues, and navigate either an IPO or an outright sale to potential suitors (Verizon is rumored to have made at least one offer) the management team has their hands full....
The Skype client has not worked for me since version 5.x came out. Nothing but crashes on both my desktop (WinXP sp3) and laptop (Vista) PC's. There seems to be plenty of others out there with similar problems:
http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=804821&st=0
I've given up on using Skype (I rarely use it, anymore). Perhaps I will try it again in future, once I buy new PC's. (only to see if it works as a test)
It's a pity, though... I started using Skype way back before most people knew what VoIP was and Skype was giving free calls to PSTN landline and mobile numbers.... just like Google Voice and GChat are doing now.
There are plenty of other options to fill the gap. Between various BYOD SIP VoIP providers and Google Voice/Chat, Skype is becoming little more than a distant memory... for me.
Jeff - cqviop.net
Posted by: Cqvoip | March 31, 2011 at 09:57 AM