Is Skype on the skids?
p2pnet news | Product News:- Skype may be going down the tubes.
Founded by Niklas Zennström and his partner, Janus Friis, who sold it to eBay for a staggering $2.6 billion, it’s a VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) application which apears to have reneged on its promise as a hardcore commercial product.
“We had to chart [Skype's] trajectory of growth and how fast that would run, (but) we found out that was a bit front-loaded,” Zennström admitted at the annual European Technology Roundtable Exhibition (ETRE) conference in Hungary.
Translated, that means it didn’t live up up to the brag.
Quoted by Reuters, “We overshot, in terms of monetization,” he said.
Translated, that means Skype failed to pull in the huge profits eBay was counting on.
“eBay said last week that it would cut as much as $1.2 billion off the $4.3 billion potential price it agreed to pay for Web-based phone-calling service Skype two years ago,” says the story, adding:
“The write-down on the value of the deal came as eBay said Skype co-founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis had resigned as executives, and it marked a tacit admission of lackluster returns from Skype since eBay acquired it two years ago.”
Problems, problems
In August, Skype went down for 48 hours and the company said the outage was triggered by millions of its users rebooting their computers following a routine download of a Windows update.
But on its Heartbeat blog, Skype later said:
“We don’t blame anyone but ourselves. The Microsoft Update patches were merely a catalyst – a trigger – for a series of events that led to the disruption of Skype, not the root cause of it.”
Skype also became embroiled in a censorship row involving China.
“Niklas Zennström, Skype’s chief executive, responded in a Financial Times interview, to accusations that the company had censored text messages containing words like ‘Falun Gong’, a banned movement, and ‘Dalai Lama’,” the FT said.
“He said Tom Online, its joint venture partner in China, was complying with local law. ‘Tom had implemented a text filter, which is what everyone else in that market is doing,’ said Mr Zennström.”
Drawn-out war
Zennström and partner Janus Friis co-founded Kazaa, the FastTrack P2P file sharing application implicated in the ongoing Warner Music, EMI, Vivendi Universal and Sony BMG sue ‘em all marketing campaign which has thrust Jammie Thomas, a First Nations woman from Minnesota, into the international limelight.
The application has received negative publicity on StopBadware.org which states flatly:
We find that Kazaa is badware because it misleadingly advertises itself as spywarefree, does not completely remove all components during the uninstall process, interferes with computer use, and makes undisclosed modifications to other software.
In its early days, Kazaa, said to have been one of, if not the, first companies to introduce spyware to the net, was sued by the corporate music industry in what became a bitter and drawn-out war between it and Australia’s Sharman Networks, which bought the application from the two.
For years Sharman tried, and failed, to align itself with Big Music, at the same time purporting to be on the side of the P2P filesharing community.
Ultimately, Sharman paid a reported $115 million to settle the case and Kazaa is now an important element in the corporate music industry’s bid to gain control of online music distribution.
After teaming up with eBay, Zennström and Friis launched Joost, designed to push TV shows and other forms of video online using P2P TV technology created by the duo.
Despite a huge amount of mainstream hype, Joost has made little impact.
Will Zennström soon say its “trajectory of growth” is as shallow as Skype’s?
Stay tuned.
Also See:
Reuters – Skype co-founder says forecasts overshot, October 12, 2007
Heartbeat blog – Skype lets Microsoft off, August 22, 2007
international limelight – Hit the RIAA and Big Music where it hurts!, October 5, 2007
censorship row – Skype in China censor row, April 20, 2007
Financial Times – Skype says texts censored by China, April 19, 2006
$115 million – Zennstrom helps Kazaa, August 10, 2007
launched Joost – Kazaa guy’s TV project,=, July 25, 2007
Use free p2pnet newsfeeds for your site. It’s really easy!
Subscribe to p2pnet.net | | rss feed: http://p2pnet.net/p2p.rss | | Mobile – http://p2pnet.net/index-wml.php
Net access blocked by government restrictions? Use Psiphon from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. Go here for the download, and here for details. Click here or here to learn how to by-pass censorship in your area.
October 13th, 2007 at 12:19 pm
Jon still hating on Nicklas and Janus because Nikki Hemming attempted to sue him .
Not that I agree with Nikkis actions against Jon but he should put a disclaimer up when he does a post related to Kazaa as there is a conflict of interest here