[colmmacc]

Early one morning in August 2007 I was asleep in my apartment in Leiden and I got a call from my boss Dirk-Willem van Gulik to tell me that 1) Skype was having a global outage, 2) we had to help anyway we could, 3) scope, budget, people, nothing would get in our way.

At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas. We built 3 networks, in 3 countries, in a matter of hours to host Skype super nodes. Apparently Skype had gotten into a retry storm due to a cascading failure because too many peer to peer super nodes had been taken offline at the same time. I think that Tuesday was Windows update day and maybe that was the straw that broke the camel's back. The small list of hard-coded super-super-nodes couldn't cope with the deluge. It took 3 days to get everything back and running, and for me it was the start of a fun collaboration with the team at Skype and eBay who were always nice.

Skype had sold to eBay for 2.6B in 2005. I don't think much diligence was done, and it didn't work out as a great integration for eBay. Then Skype was spun out and sold to Private Equity in 2009. The internet tells me that 65% was sold for 1.9B but I think there was some kind of write-down involved too. And then Microsoft bought Skype for 8.5B in 2009.

So you can have multi-day world-headline outages, be from and based in the EU, and still have 3 unicorn scale exits! There's a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient you can make a business with a great product and good leaders.

[varjag]

It's funny how eBay still did better stewardship of Skype than Microsoft.

[dagaci]

Some error corrections: ebay bought skype in 2005 for 2.6B (1 million concurrent user), and Microsoft bought them in 2011 for 8.5B (22 million concurrent users) with 74 million concurrent users reported in 2013 falling to apparently 30 million now...

https://www.statista.com/chart/1417/skype-usage/

What is your criteria for stewardship ?

[varjag]

Microsoft had essentially left it for dead shortly after the acquisition. There were multiple assassination attempts from Lyncs-become-Skype-for-Business-become-Teams department and I can only assume noone to fend for the foster child.

Skype under Microsoft had only seen sidelining and feature & platform regress, while it was a thriving product during eBay ownership. It may not be obvious from the bar graphs but it was apparent when one used the product.

[aa-jv]

Skype was an intelligence-gathering platform with very few equals. In the era that Skype was producing unicorn horns, surveillance capitalism was on a rocket ride.

I doubt those same conditions would allow for multiple unicorn horns in the modern era. You can't build a Skype-like surveillance network now; that horse has left the barn.

[colmmacc]

At its height Skype made its money in surprising ways. There was a margin on Skype credits, which paid for calls into the regular phone system. But there was much more money in brand licensing. Time was you could buy not just "Skype certified" headsets, cameras, but even non-telephony gear like USB thumb drives. SanDisk carried those for years and I presume they out-sold the alternatives enough to be worth the licensing.

It always amazed me. What did Skype have to say about a Thumb Drive. But the brand had a lot of trust. A lot of people appreciated how simple and reliable it was, and the fun blue interface was very comforting.

On the surveillance side, it was rumored that Microsoft bought Skype in part to do a solid for the US DOJ. DOJ would get a cooperative partner for lawful interception / metadata, while Microsoft might get some relief from their anti-trust woes. But all of the principals I've ever spoken to deny this as a motivation and nothing has come out over the years to contradict that.

I do recall Microsoft putting Skype in their ads org for a long time, but not much seemed to come from that either.

[jgalt212]

> But the brand had a lot of trust.

Not for me. I always regarded it as one giant security hole in an era when Windows was riddled with them.

[westmeal]

What about discord?

[aa-jv]

What about it? Nobody is going to buy it for billions of dollars, as has happened to Skype.

You can still do surveillance capitalism - its just not as valuable as it used to be ..

[mid-kid]

What are you talking about? Technology is as widespread as ever and chances to use AI for more effective surveillance and manipulation are through the roof.

[aa-jv]

We are in the mid-stages of all of this, now. Skype was at the forefront.

Surveillance capitalism today doesn't produce the same returns now that it did in 2005/7 ... there are a lot more players and a lot more work to be done to become a viable operation.

Besides which, the weaponisation of such surveillance networks is out in the open and there is a lot more resistance - for example, in Europe - to the idea of having this form of integration into the telecommunication networks of states.

[ignoramous]

> you can make a business with a great product

Depends on the market reach. A product struggling due to scale (a good problem to have: Like WhatsApp c. early 2010s during New Years) and a product that mostly does not do what it should (the very many dead WhatsApp clones) are very different things.

> a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient

I remember the time Skype was pre-installed on popular Androids (including the Kindle Fire) and yet couldn't compete with the likes of Viber, Kik, LINE, WeChat (which also came pre-installed). Think MSFT was that soft landing that broke that resilience.

> So you can have multi-day world-headline outages ... unicorn scale

I mean, us-east-1 is a prime example ;)