Skype Expresses $1 Worth of Sorrow
Summary: Skype is sorry that their house of cards collapsed. Sorry, to the tune of $1.
Skype is sorry that their house of cards collapsed. Sorry, to the tune of $1. That's the amount of "Skype Credit" that they are offering to their paying subscribers. As far as I can tell, that is the amount offered, regardless of the type or magnitude of the user's subscription, and there is no provision for users who have annual subscriptions already paid to be able to cash in on this bonanza. In my opinion this is just another indication of Skype's total disregard of their users.
They have also posted a "technical explanation of the outage" on one of their blogs. What it boils down to is that they have built a house of cards, and a couple of the cards near the bottom got pulled out, so the entire house collapsed. Big surprise. Because the vast majority of the resources used in building the house of cards do not belong to Skype, and are not under Skype's control, there is very little they can do (basically nothing) when the structure starts to collapse. The moral of this part of the story is, do not depend on Skype services for anything that is critical, such as your life, your communication or your business. If you value your money, do not under any circumstances give money to Skype for services which may or nay not be available at the time that you want or need them.
Finally, what Skype has been forced to say publicly this time, which they have tried to avoid saying at all costs in the past, is that their software may silently decide to set itself up as a "supernode" on an ordinary user's computer. If it does so, it will then start to use computing power and internet bandwidth on that computer to service the Skype network - and it will do all of this without either asking for permission in advance or announcing what it is about to do, or has just done. The moral of this part of the story is if you are paying for your Internet connection in some limited quantity, whether it be volume-based, time-based or whatever, then you should stay completely away from Skype, or you might find yourself unknowingly paying for supporting Skype's house of cards.
jw
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Talkback
How much would you pile onto a software company that has so little regard for its users that it has accumulated YEARS of history of software so unstable and so highly vulnerable to all sorts of viruses, Trojans and hacking that it has cost untold thousands (millions?) of users untold MILLIONS of dollars in losses?
Boo!!
There, GreyGeek. I've named the bogey man so he can't get you now (and we can get back on topic).
Skype have a marvelous business plan. They charge you for a service which you then provide yourself, at your own expense and relying on 'servers' with standard domestic computer stability.
What could possibly go wrong?
@Tezzer - What could go wrong indeed! I shudder to think... But there are two more important parts of Skype's business plan that should be mentioned. 1. There is no such thing as bad publicity (there is only publicity, and all publicity is good by definition). 2. If you repeat something often enough, and loud enough, it will be accepted as fact (witness their "500 million registered users" garbage - until this outage happened, and then the number of users affected suddenly became much, much smaller).
One other thing that I find amusing about all of this. The founders of Skype certainly knew when to take the money and run, and even at that they were smart enough not to sell the "heart" of Skype's technology, so they could go back and demand even more money from eBay. Now, that "heart" of the technology turns out to be the "heart" of the congenital weakness in Skype's house of cards. How ironic.
jw
I take it you are complaining about their "super nodes", i.e., Skype-user's computers acting as servers for other users. It's not a problem with Windows users because super nodes can be turned off in Windows. Unfortunately, there is no provision for turning off the super nodes on Linux client machines, short of shutting down Skype when you are not using it or not expecting a call. By using a P2P type network Skype is even more stable than a a centrally located resource server because packets can be re-routed when one user's super node is shut down for what ever reason. BTW - if what I've read is true this outage was caused by a program update failure turning off super nodes. "Standard domestic computer stability" doesn't apply for the same reason DARPA created the Internet -- data would route around nodes "taken out" during war-time. The Internet seems to be doing pretty well and the paradigm is working well for Skype, too.
I don't know much about Skype's business plan but I do know that using Skype VOIP I can and do talk for free to any other Skype user at any time and any place where VOIP is legal (except in China as of today). And, with my paid account I can talk to any land line or cell phone in most 1st world countries for 2-3 cents/min, which is very affordable long distance charges. I keep all my phone numbers in my Skype contacts list and when my cell phone rates are in the 10-40 cents/min zone I use Skype to make important calls. When I was going to school 2 was 1/5th of 10 or 1/20th of 40.
Ekiga is nice, and I've used it in the past, but it is not as polished as Skype and most non-technical users find it harder to set up. The GUI tends to crash and contacts can become invisible, making them unable to call, remove from the list, or re-add. To connect one must use a public server or set up their own, which is the equivalent of a super node and hence, by your thinking, "provide their own service".
afa "Boo" is concerned, you should read up on James Plamondon and his "mea culpa", and down load and read the 3096.pdf, a copy of a training manual, of sorts, that he wrote to teach MS "Technical Evangelists" how to "compete". It's scarier than you realize.