Om just posted a piece "Skype, VoIP Honeymoon over?" related to what seems to be a growing dissatisfaction of the Skype user community around SkypeOut billing issues, and the quality of the service. He follows up on a CNET piece from yesterday.
This has been a long time coming. I originally posted about their credit card issue last September. Ever since, Skype users have been leaving comments/complaints on that post relating their problems. I have also mentioned this issue to DFJ, one of their investors, who told me that (obviously) everything was done to resolve the issue.
Whilst they are most definitely leaving money on the table, the magnitude of the "loss" is not clear to me. It might be significant - in which case they ought to do something about it quickly, or it might be relatively negligible. As I type this, 2M users are logged in on the system and Skype claims to have served close to 5 billion minutes. This doubles their numbers from last November, that I recorded in this post. When you face this type of hyper-growth, it is generally accepted that you are going to have a few hiccups with the service.
What is clearer is that many seem to complain about the lack of proper support infrastructure. And I can see from the keywords used to access my blog that a lot of people are looking for Skype alternatives.
So hemorrhage ? Definitely not. Leak ? Drip ? We'll see. It would however be nice for Skype 's CEO to publicly address these concerns and tell us, Skype (and paying SkypeOut) users, what is being done about them. Or, as a proxy, Steve Jurvetson could post something on his blog. But this impression that users' voice is not being listened to, and replied to, in this day and age, is just not what a company wants to give. Especially when so many other VOIP players are on the horizon.
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