Skype

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• neutral assessment Aaron Walter

  I don't really have any qualms with it um you know there are some things that are kind of annoying there's kind of like this semi-cluttered uh left bar where you're seeing lots of different like kind of smart searches or something people you've talked to recently no way to customize that that's a little tedious but um it I mean it's not so cumbersome that it's not usable

• bearish criticism Liz Gannes

  I want to know how Skype gained like five plus billion dollars in value in like less than a year a year and a half or something since it went independent I mean I don't exactly get why uh why Skype today is that different from Skype before why why the economic circumstances changed so much

• bearish assessment Tyler

  Facebook is announcing a press event around this new thing and the the rumor mill is that it's the video video chat Skype integration. Um, okay. I don't think that would be so exciting.

• neutral fact_claim Tammy Camp

  Skype killer. You know, people have adopted Skype. It's the world's largest phone company.

• bearish assessment William Quigley

  This is the most elegant Skype killer I've ever seen.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  how many times have we done an angel meeting or a launch meeting or a tech watch 50 meeting or any of these meetings and somebody's like oh hit me on Skype hit me on this hit me on that Google talk all these free services yeah they never work they never work I mean it's one thing if you're trying to chat with your mom yeah you know or you know whatever chatting with your your boyfriend or your girlfriend that's you know whatever okay yeah you Skype when you want a serious business meeting and yo

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  how many times have we done an angel meeting or a launch meeting or a tech watch 50 meeting or any of these meetings and somebody's like oh hit me on Skype hit me on this hit me on that Google talk all these free services yeah they never work they never work

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  hit me on Skype hit me on this hit me on that Google talk all these free services yeah they they never work they never work I mean it's one thing if you're trying to chat with your mom you know or you know whatever chatting with your your boyfriend or your girlfriend that's you know whatever okay yeah you Skype when you want a serious business meeting

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we've kind of evolved um to include applications so you can do there's apps like praising co-workers uh posting polls and questions uh ideas uh you can search expertise um we have groups now there's file sharing within groups

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  we rapidly added conversations so sort of like fully threaded like like more like on Facebook uh which is more suitable I think for for companies

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  Yammer never had the 140 character limit so we were never truly micro blogging

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Yammer spends a lot of time with Enterprise IT talking about security explaining why you know this is not a risk

• neutral fact_claim Steve Jurvetson

  then when they sell to eBay you're like wow that was a big win that we missed

• bearish assessment Steve Jurvetson

  we thought corporate investors swooping in for series a quadrupling our offer ah you know that must be crazy it couldn't actually be worth that much

• neutral fact_claim Steve Jurvetson

  there's no concept of Skype on on desktops initially mobile phones are where the future is

• bearish criticism Steve Jurvetson

  the Skype stuff's gone because I don't want to hold Microsoft I mean where's that going

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  when you did it Standalone it was just I mean certainly there's there's there C companies which are you know founder Le and focused are the successful companies right I mean it's like it's Prett easy us to see even at the big tech companies you know the public companies and you know the ones which are founder Le and the ones which are hired CEOs which are the ones with success

• mixed criticism Unattributed

  when you guys were working on it the product was developing and it became better and better then eBay bought it nothing happened with it the product looked exactly the same then you buy guys bought it back the product started becoming new and all this new stuff coming then Microsoft bought it nothing happens the product stands still

• bullish fact_claim Niklas Zennstrom

  the only thing you can come up with is is a binary outcome either we're going to get crushed or we're going to be sustained of course it turn out that we sustain them and they could not compete with us

• bullish endorsement Niklas Zennstrom

  even today with WhatsApp and Facebook messenger and Google Hangout when I want to make a proper video call Skype is the only thing that like always works

• neutral assessment Niklas Zennstrom

  it would be fantastic if we've done an IPO and um because this is something that we need here we we need we need to have some true breakout companies that that doesn't sell so you know it it would have been it would been really good if if if in a way that if if Skype was now a European you know um public company

• neutral fact_claim Niklas Zennstrom

  then you guys doubled or tripled the value of it when you sold to Microsoft

• neutral fact_claim Niklas Zennstrom

  eBay later a few years later they decided that you know they should focus on on on e-commerce yeah so they thought that they should sell the majority of Skype so we participated in a buyout together with yeah with Silver Lake and andreon and then we put jolted into that so that was you know the company got so all the IP was perfect

• neutral fact_claim Niklas Zennstrom

  when we sold Skype to eBay if we didn't sell jolted right so you kept the underlying technology

• bullish assessment Niklas Zennstrom

  we came up with Skype and and kind of incubated Skype from from jolted and and that became the huge success that really put you on the map yeah you sold that for a couple billion bucks

• bullish endorsement Sebastian Siemiatkowski

  Nicholas to us was like I mean he is still the biggest thing that ever happened to Stockholm you know because we were all like you know we wanted to start a company and nobody thought that you could build like a you know a unicorn in Stockholm right you could only do that in Silicon Valley and the rest of us was just you know playing around in the mud or something and then this guy comes along and he builds you know a global company you know with a stock on background so it was such a huge inspi

• neutral fact_claim Yossi Vardi

  First it was phone calls and what they have done again speaking about one feature until they created Skype for VO the for voice the standard in the telephony was three kilohz the bandwidth for the for the audio they created a codec which allow I think 8.3 kilohz. So the sound sound rich very rich you know everybody was amazed didn't understand what's what's going on.

• neutral fact_claim Yossi Vardi

  Skype came uh for seven years, ICQ was number one on download.com... But then came uh these guys from uh Estonia or uh some created Skype. Yeah. Came with one more feature executed extremely well video took the market.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  It's like, well, now it's in Skype and Skype's taking the time to create a literal pixel by pixel.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  Effectively what we ended up doing was building a system to run a business, not a department. That's really the big idea behind NetSuite. And that's, you know, foundational to what we've done. It was really sort of the basis for how we were able to grow to a billion dollars.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  on demand skype was you know supposed to do what we're doing right here and now zoom you know figured it out

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  It was free to use Zoom at first and Skype, you had to be on that plan. And I think those were the two deciding factors.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  it was a little bit challenging to initially set up your Skype... Every week when we produced that show, I would have to teach the guests how to use Skype because they were all comedians. And that was, it was a tough, like the first half hour you're on Skype, it was confusing. And Zoom made that a lot simpler.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  if your company does not become YouTube or Instagram inside of Google or Meta, you become Skype inside of Microsoft. And Microsoft has all these other products that are booming... the CEO is like, what's going on with Skype? Okay. Yeah. Do I give more resources to something that's kind of spiraling? No. Just, you know, let it, as we say in the business, you sunset the business, you deprecate the business.

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  in 2020, Skype had roughly 32% market share in the video call category. That was down to basically 6.3% in 2021.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  Zoom is at Kleinex level. Like when you say you want to have a video conference with somebody, you use, you use the word Zoom. It's, it's called a Zoom. And that happened so quickly. And Skype had a huge lead headstart.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Has a product that was so promising ever been more mismanaged than Skype? How did Skype die? And Google.com didn't. So weird.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  we shouldn't listen to anything they have to say about moore's law even today oh wow

• bearish fact_claim Unattributed

  basically over 10 years about 15 years ago intel was no longer the frontier of moore's law really

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  intel in their development of the cpu the you know the pentium onward um was using human ingenuity to try to build a better and better single processor and then a few multi-core but ultimately nothing like nvidia or the asic or the custom chips to follow that fundamentally ran out of steam there wasn't that much advance you can make while being backward compatible and the the later sort of late cycle intel chips were mostly memory by the way they were like 99.5 percent memory so much of cache me

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  intel was a bit of in their minds a marketing kind of channel management process to try to double every 18 months correct

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  that's largely being dictated by intel in its personal trajectory it doesn't actually relate to this curve because on this curve we're not counting transistors no one buys transistors like that's a weird count like how many transistors on a chip who cares how about how much memory do i have and if it takes too many trans if it takes more transistors as it does today than ever before to store a bit of memory why are we counting transitions let's count actual things that matter memory storage or c

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  which by the way skype then used later for voice and other companies use for video and it sort of you know was a playbook if you will for how best to grow a consumer facing um business

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  because it was incredibly cheeky at the time to embed a commercial message involuntarily to everything your customers sent so you signed up for hotmail it feels like a normal email account but now every message you sent had a get your free email at hotmail.com right like a call to action controversial exactly and tim wanted it more controversial he was pounding the table that he wanted to say as if it was written by the sender p.s i love hotmail i love you guy the founders wanted like nothing to

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  it was the idea to do that was tim draper's idea 100 and i not me and and i just want to give credit to him

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  the thing that it really epitomized was first you know rapid internet growth for us second this thing we basically coined the term viral marketing because of hotmail trying to describe for a blog post what is it that hotmail did that was so different from other internet companies this idea that the message itself was the vector of uh of spread of marketing in a sense no like a virus which came from the signature when you sent a hot mail it said sent by hotmail or powered by hotmail

• bullish fact_claim Unattributed

  the hotmail was a really yeah that was like the first one people have heard of boom like that was the first one that got visibility bought by microsoft bingo for about 400 million dollars uh you know less than two years in