Every day I see Yet Another WebRTC based service come to life. Today its "ROOM" which has a very simple beta list signup going on where if you tweet their existence you get immediate access to the beta. Services like Slack, Hall, HipChat, Vobi and many others are offering what I'm calling Skype Takeaway Service (STS) often for free, often even richer in experience and more modern for the times.
Skype has in my view become the AOL AIM (AOL's Instant Messenger) of this decade.
An awesome service that stalled in development because of the so-called bigger picture of where Microsoft is heading. Let's face it, you can't be using the mobile operators as distribution partners, buying a handset manufacturer (Nokia) and trying to reconfigure legacy ideas like Exchange and their own Messenger service to the cloud and not realize that Skype's technology in the middle led to all of that being disrupted. At the same time redesigning the whole Skype technology, to basically make it a SIP like clone vs. the Peer 2 Peer approach it had also didn't just happen overnight.
Those factors and declining call quality, an almost step child like integration approach with other services, the killing off of the Skype hardware API, less and less developer relations activity, the expansion and deeper integration by Google surrounding Hangouts, Google Voice and of course WebRTC all are signs that Skype's days are numbered.
So the disruptor gets finally disrupted. Still, it will take a while and Microsoft may start to get aggressive in improving it so as to not write off the huge purchase price.
Posted by: Rtehrani | July 25, 2014 at 01:24 PM