It is not a good sign that I am too busy to comment about Skype and the EBay quarterly report. I don’t watch closely but Skype Journal is a great reminder of these events. Skype should be concerned that I am spending time with Facebook instead of Skype. Of course they might not care what I personally am doing but the numbers of developers and applications on Facebook speak for themselves. Skype should be asking if there is a lesson here. There is.
First developers do not need to pay the platform and find a place among favorite sons and big money. While there are always going to be some advantages to dominant participants, Facebook offers a remarkably level playing field. The platform benefits from developer applications and innovation beyond the platform itself. Skype does have the most versatile telephony platform. In my view they barely appreciate it. It is not exploited as well as it could be. Users certainly have little visibility into the benefits of such. (Compare to Facebook where users rule.)
And here is a real fundamental that is missed as far as I can tell. I think the biggest general malaise around Skype is staring us all in the face. I can barely figure out Skype. Now how can an average user approaching Skype know what benefits may accrue, if it is so complicated and obscure that I can’t even explain it easily to such a user? The Skype Journal posting by Jim Courtney correctly wonders, what is the rate of acquiring real users? Why are so many coming but not staying? Duh. Do you suppose something is lost in the translation and users don’t want to spend hours trying to figure how it can help?
For some reason the Skype website (they aren’t the only one) does not want to clearly express all the various user benefits. You have to probe and probe, go to sign-up pages and present various alternatives to see what you might discover. They make a phone company look straightforward. Names of initiatives change, get modified and restructured so that if you knew what something was last year, it’s not quite the same now. I get the best insight on explanations that come periodically on Skype Journal. If Skype Journal has to explain what Skype features are offered this is a very sad state of affairs.
The Skype value proposition is dependent on where you are in the world. Maybe they don’t want that so visible, but so what. If a new visitor cannot figure out what possible value may be delivered to them, or to their friends and family elsewhere, the user moves on. If the unique capabilities of the Skype platform are not exploited, it degrades into just another IP voice option from a visitors view. I think Skype remains largely dependent on word of mouth for one user to introduce others. In the beginning that was very useful. Check the calendar, it’s 2008.