[dualogy]

I remember when the web and later peer2peer was just taking off: "this is the death of the middleman".

And here we are, as the "masses" joined in the fun, we're surrounded by not just middle-men but huge middleman-concerns, walled gardens, "siren servers".

Turns out AoL and Yahoo had it about right, they were just 15 years too early and a tad too innocuous ;D

(Only tangentially related but remember why Skype took off? It was (branded as) "fully peer-to-peer". Freeing millions from the shackles of the telcos, yay! Now flip it to eBay first, to MS next and here we are, the world's biggest NSA backdoor and botnet. Neat!)

[kogir]

Skype took off because they were masters of evading firewalls and corporate network blocks. People used it because it worked when nothing else would.

That it was P2P was always an implementation detail, not a selling point.

[TheLegace]

I don't know I think closed just seemed natural human behaviour as oppose to opening things up. There is a different realm in custom hardware like phones and tablets where vendors are just dicks. They don't make it possible to run any other software. I have been waiting for years to run Linux on a consumer device. After years of Android and iOS all we have is the Nexus 4,7 and 10 which are still in beta so their experience isn't so great.

The biggest influence for the industry was created by Apple, and Steve Jobs is definitely sour at what Bill Gates and then later Eric Schmidt did to Apple. It's not really surprising, these large companies will naturally go towards more closed down systems.

[Roritharr]

With most of the architectural decisions of skype known... why wouldn't anyone create an alternative?