Will Skype will become the p2p mobile enabler?
Niklas Zennström, founder of Skype, received the title most powerful IT person, in Sweden, at an event held by the magazine Ny Teknik in Kista Science Tower this afternoon. Well, he has deserved it and if there was a similar world title he should be the next on the list.
Bill Gates is pouring billions of his private fortune into medical research and the distribution of vaccinations and medicine to the poor. Niklas Zennström has enabled a service most of us have been used to pay enormous amounts of money for, and that at least half of the world would never afford using at all. So Skype is a good company, from the very start.
Then Zennström's definition of good company is a company that is honest. He says an honest company is treating the user of the service with respect, which manifests itself through free service, no banners, no advertising and simple pricing.
He mentions Google and Ebay as companies he sees the family Skype belongs to, which have been successful. No company today can afford to spend marketing money promoting a product that doesn't deliver on promise; one unhappy customers/blogger and the word will spread. p2p in effect. He gets it all.
Skype's business model is basically, give away the service for free, spend no marketing money and rely on the 5% who will pay for additional services. The exponential growth of the company, 150 000 new users each day, generated by word of mouth, p2p, from existing users will secure profitability - one day.
Where is Skype heading? Skype is heading for the mobile space. And this is where Skype will really rock the boat with the operators who have tried for years to enable p2p distribution of content - and nothing has really happened since sms, even if most of us have been quite excited by video the past year.
The design director at Nokia told me a month ago that his misjudgment of MMS was basically that people don't want to send images to strangers. Well this cannot be true, as Lunarstorm finds that what it's users do all the time is communicating by exposing photos of everything. And marketing director, David Erixon, of Vodafone Sweden agrees, it is to difficult to send MMS, the UI of the mobile phone is flaw.
By moving Skype to wifi phones p2p content will fly. The challenge for Skype will be to stay true to it's vision of being an honest company, avoid turning into a Telco and be wise enough to quickly develop a brilliant design strategy which will set the specifications for how Skype branded phones should look, feel and work.
Bill Gates is pouring billions of his private fortune into medical research and the distribution of vaccinations and medicine to the poor. Niklas Zennström has enabled a service most of us have been used to pay enormous amounts of money for, and that at least half of the world would never afford using at all. So Skype is a good company, from the very start.
Then Zennström's definition of good company is a company that is honest. He says an honest company is treating the user of the service with respect, which manifests itself through free service, no banners, no advertising and simple pricing.
He mentions Google and Ebay as companies he sees the family Skype belongs to, which have been successful. No company today can afford to spend marketing money promoting a product that doesn't deliver on promise; one unhappy customers/blogger and the word will spread. p2p in effect. He gets it all.
Skype's business model is basically, give away the service for free, spend no marketing money and rely on the 5% who will pay for additional services. The exponential growth of the company, 150 000 new users each day, generated by word of mouth, p2p, from existing users will secure profitability - one day.
Where is Skype heading? Skype is heading for the mobile space. And this is where Skype will really rock the boat with the operators who have tried for years to enable p2p distribution of content - and nothing has really happened since sms, even if most of us have been quite excited by video the past year.
The design director at Nokia told me a month ago that his misjudgment of MMS was basically that people don't want to send images to strangers. Well this cannot be true, as Lunarstorm finds that what it's users do all the time is communicating by exposing photos of everything. And marketing director, David Erixon, of Vodafone Sweden agrees, it is to difficult to send MMS, the UI of the mobile phone is flaw.
By moving Skype to wifi phones p2p content will fly. The challenge for Skype will be to stay true to it's vision of being an honest company, avoid turning into a Telco and be wise enough to quickly develop a brilliant design strategy which will set the specifications for how Skype branded phones should look, feel and work.
posted by Maja Brisvall at 8:46 PM
3 Comments:
Yes it will - and for one simple reason: The only p2p application that will attract huge numbers of users - both producers and consumers - is voice. I have advocated this since the early days of broadband deployment that the symmetry of broadband Internet connections is useless. And I think I was right! Look at the usage today! Look at the pricing structure of all important broadband connections presently. There is an unsymmetry factor around 20 times in bandwidth - uplink vs. downlink. Only narrow-band communications is naturally symmetrical and p2p. Since most people cannot produce broadband content that is meaningful for others to enjoy. Peter Löthberg and all other Internet freaks may be upset but such is life!
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