Skype Continues to Grow Despite Telecoms

 The Observer

The internet is really just a giant machine for springing surprises. And this is - as programmers joke - a ‘feature’, not a bug. That is to say, the net’s capacity to facilitate disruptive innovation was designed into it from the beginning. Essentially, if you can do something with data packets, then the internet will do it for you, with no questions asked. So, ever since the network was switched on in January 1983, smart programmers have been doing clever things with data packets and in the process springing surprises on the rest of us.

The biggest surprises tend to be two-edged swords. On the one hand, users love them and they spread like wildfire. On the other, they generally threaten to destabilise someone’s hitherto cosy business model and are thus a cause of angst, rage, frustration and - ultimately - bankruptcy. Thus, file-sharing came as a nasty surprise to the record industry in 1999. Wikipedia came as a nasty surprise to Encyclopaedia Britannica. And, in recent years, internet telephony - or voice over internet protocol (VoIP) - has come as a nasty surprise to a particular bunch of businesses: the phone companies (aka telecoms).

When many of the current crop of senior telecoms executives pass away, the word ‘Skype’ will be found engraved on their hearts. Skype, as every teenager knows, is a system for making free telephone calls over the internet.