Making sense of Skype Google and eBay
For some reason that I don’t fully understand, when I think of Skype, I invariably end up thinking of Google. Not just because both are competing in a Voice over IP segment, with Skype’s entire existence being on its excellent VoIP software for broadband connections, and Google bringing out Google Talk that seems to be working well even on slower connections.
Google is a darling of today’s technologists, investors and users. It provides lots of useful, easy to use and free services which have endeared it to the Internet community over the last couple of years. Last month, Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the Internet joined the company as Chief Internet Evangelist. By hiring Vint Cerf, Google has added one of the most respected technical brains to its team, who is widely seen as an icon in the computer industry. Apart from his seminal work on TCP/IP with Robert Kahn, Vint is also largely responsible for influencing policies that have led to widespread growth and adoption of the Internet.
Skype, on the other hand, is a relatively recent startup. But it has caught up virally, and as this article points out, Skype is currently adding approximately 150,000 users a day and is considered the market leader in virtually all countries in which it does business. In North America alone, Skype has more users and serves more voice minutes than any other Internet voice communications provider.
With the recent aquisition of Skype by eBay, the dynamics of the game have changed for sure. What remains to be seen is how exactly does the lordly hand of eBay helps Skype compete with Google talk and other instant messengers who must be spending sleepless nights worrying (and probably working) on how to stand up to Skype’s challenge in the VoIP market. An obvious advantage for eBay is facilitating transactions using Skype: when you see an interesting item on eBay, look up the sellers’ Skype ID and ring them up. Given the way Skype has been performing while scaling to tens of millions of users, I wouldn’t be surprised if Skype quickly becomes a de facto medium to facilitate online transactions, particularly for individual sellers and small enterprises.
I personally consider Google to be the most useful website on the Internet. And it might be interesting to speculate what might have happened if Google had acquired Skype instead. I think it would have been a delight for the user. Google would have ended up having a high-quality highly-visible VoIP product to go with its other impressive services.
Skype and eBay are excellent examples of viral systems that start small, grow fast, are scalable, and whose value increases with with the number of users. But thinking of Reed’s law for a moment, one would realise that the value of being on eBay is dramatically increased by the fact that interactions, exchanges and transactions are not just individual, but groupwise too. My interpretation of Reed’s law is that it is a direct result of people getting more out of a network when they are able to identify and utilize common areas of interest within a subset of the network.
Skype has essentially been a point-to-point network from a user point of view(other than conference calls). From a social engineering viewpoint, its use on eBay will give it a totally new dimension. From being a medium mostly for personal calls, its going to change into one for business dealings. That’s also where I start worrying though.
What if companies start aggregating users IDs from eBay and start making sales calls? This is bound to happen if IDs are made available on eBay. Imagine your Skype ringing at 4 in the morning, and someone on the ‘line’ wants to sell cheap bedsheets. eeks.
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Durga,
Thanks for this well written and thoughtful post. It is certainly a fantastic landscape for internet users. By connecting to these services we inevitably become more public and vulnerable. We want to be able to coordinate with other people in the network, but how to be open those that will bring value in the coordination vs those that will not when you do not know of them in advanced? Hard to tell. Mechanisms to inform, warn or control our gates like status icons, alerts or spam filters, can continue helping until an inventive solution comes to resolve the contradiction. Meanwhile, we can continue enjoying and pushing the frontiers of human development with these darling services.