Skype: New features but still quite a few issues ?

Engadget just published a worthy interview of Niklas Zennström, the CEO of Skype, by J. D. Lasica. Also found this Silicon.com interview.

Amongst other things (voicemail, video-conference, etc.), Zennström mentions that Skype is going to roll-out a SkypeIn capability (at some point during the winter) allowing regular telephone users to reach a Skype user. This supposedly means that Skype users will be assigned a telephone number, and that Skype will become a full blown VOIP service. This is cool...
Until now, it was possible to call (almost) any telephone number from the Skype user interface by using SkypeOut... when it works (rant below). Skype also recently released Skype Wifi, that allows PocketPC (and soon "Windows SmartPhone, Symbian and Palm") users to use the service on their smart phone.

Skype has enjoyed a fantastic adoption rate since its launch on Aug 29th, 2003:

13M+ users registered

1M+ simultaneous users reached for the first time a couple of weeks ago

2,384,686,217 minutes served, as I type this - i.e almost 2.4 billion minutes. Just to put things in perspective: Vonage has 170,000 customers and passed the billion minutes mark sometime in 2004

295,000 users have signed for SkypeOut (Skype has a goal of 5% conversion from the free service to SkypeOut)

Slightly off topic, but Skype has "only" raised $19M in VC financing, vs. $200M+ (and counting, from what I heard) for Vonage, which reportedly spends $450 to acquire a customer. Talking about "capital efficiency"...

I have been a happy and grateful user of Skype for over a year, but I have noticed recently that the quality of international calls tended to degrade compared to a few months ago ("ransom of success").
More problematic seems to be the chronic issue that Skype is having with SkypeOut and its credit card processing function. I blogged about this a while back, and to my amazement, Skype seems unable to correct these issues. As recently as last month, they announced that Spanish credit cards were not accepted. The reason why I am aware of this issue is that a significant number of people (from Italy, Japan, Israel, Germany, France,...) are coming to my former post after searching "skype+credit+card+problem". And taking a look at their support forum, it sounds as though many are experiencing the same issues, and some are openly blogging their frustration.
I have also heard a lot of complaints about their their online support: always very nice and polite, but of very limited usefulness (which is kinda problematic).

Hopefully they'll get their act together, and will soon fix their credit card issue (unlike so many other startups, their problem is that they can't take the money people want to pay for their service ;-), and their support function.

Update: Skype has fixed a buffer overrun flaw in version 10.0.100 of its Windows software. Make sure to download and install this fix (i.e version 10.0.100 and up). And my good friend Marc has had an issue with the contact upload facility that spammed his (very large) address book.

Comments

[Andrew]

I believe the credit card problems will be solved shortly, and will be further relieved by moving to a more decentralised sales approach utilizing partners etc. However no excuse today to have a problematic ecommerce solution regardless of the volume (which might be the issue here)

I think the push into the business market is the real diamond here, enabling virtual workgroups etc. At least I hope it is, as it is what I do for a living.. :) Great blog.

[Tom]

Call quality for not only Skypeout but also skype-to-skype is disappointing most of the time. Disappointing enough to make me sign up to Vonage instead.

[Pascal]

I am a happy user of Skype, I think the quality is just great (and amazing for the price).