Skype Roundup
It looks like I'm not the only one who is absolutely sick and tired of Skype, and their poorly functioning, broken software that they show no interest in either fixing or supporting, and the Skype Cheerleaders (aka The Skype Journal).
Jan Geirnaert writes in his Skype Watch blog, and in a comment to an interview by the Skype Cheerleaders of the Skype CEO. Jan asks why the Cheerleaders never ask the difficult questions of Skype, but the answer to that seems pretty obvious to me. Skype has found a way to have a puff-ball interview without having to look totally ridiculous by having the "interview" conducted by their own PR department. Personally, I have been waiting anxiously for the segment that is supposed to be about "support", I can hardly wait to see what the Cheerleaders asked... if it ever shows up at all.
Andy Abramson writes in his VoIP Watch blog about problems with chat messages arriving days late, and says that the Skype presence engine "needs some tweaking". I have said, and documented, many times that the Skype "presence engine" is ridiculously unreliable, and as a result contact requests and chat messages can be delayed by anywhere from a few minutes to days or weeks. Skype has been aware of these problems for well over a year, they have claimed that they were "fixed" in basically every release since 3.0, and they still exist today.
Oh, and by the way, the Cheerleaders didn't venture anywhere near something as potentially touchy or embarrassing as asking why Skype can't get presence reporting right, or what the implications are of an IM system built on top of an unreliable presence reporting system are.
Jan also made a good point last week about the hype that Skype and the Cheerleaders tried to raise over the one billionth download of Skype. If you do the math rather quickly, you find that would mean about 550,000 downloads per day, every single day, for five years. Everyone here who believes that, raise your hand... Uh-huh. I put exactly as much faith in this "statistic" as I do in Skype's incessant claims of "330 million registered users".
jw 30/9/2008