On 5/11/2011 10:03 AM, Ted Roche wrote: > On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Dan Covill<[email protected]> wrote: > >> Agreed. I see Skype as a great idea, poorly executed. > > Expand on that, if you would, please. I've been using Skype for about > 5 years and have racked up a fair number of calls on it. Quality was > acceptable and the free price was a big bonus, compared to the local > telephone company tariffs. I understand a 170 million or so users take > advantage of the service. And the infrastructure is primarily > peer-to-peer to spread the bandwidth usage, and only centralize the > directory services. Seemed like a pretty good design to me. >
Sorry, Ted, I wasn't being very careful. The experience you state is exactly what I meant by 'a great idea', there is clearly a market, and their directory seems to work well for the users. I guess when I said 'poorly executed' I really meant 'poorly engineered', and I'm basing that pretty much on Woody Leonhard's InfoWorld blog entry: <http://www.infoworld.com/t/voip/what-microsoft-thinking-paying-85b-skype-568?page=0,0> "It's hard to envision what Microsoft intends to do with Skype for corporate IT. Skype is widely regarded by network admins as anathema. Five years ago, at the BlackHat conference in Europe, Philippe Biodi and Fabrice Desclaux described Skype's obfuscated code, saying it "looks like /dev/random" and it hasn't gotten any better. Like any P2P program, Skype basically runs a backdoor, with random pings and relays going out even when there's nobody using the phone. Security people love software like that." So we have two different worlds, each its own problem. The IT world, whence most of MS' income derives, seems unlikely to want it if it won't play well with servers and security. And the personal world, where Skype's user base is now, pay exactly zero. So how do you make a business out of that? Dan Covill _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: [email protected] Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech Searchable Archive: http://leafe.com/archives/search/profox This message: http://leafe.com/archives/byMID/profox/[email protected] ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
