Chronicles of a Wandering Mind

We communicate regularly with our family members distributed all over the world from China, Turkey, US, etc. Skype video has been great for our family to stay in touch. My parents first saw my 1 week old daughter via Skype Video.

Skype has been our primary communications tool in our
little company (<10 people in three continents) for over a year now.
It’s been a key business enabler for us. I use SkypeIn, SkypeOut as well, and bought couple of Skype certified
devices, so I consider myself a run of the mill Skype customer.

But Skype has been evolving away from our needs and as time goes by problems increase rather than decrease.

I’ve seen an article in Skype journal about Skype identity crisis. It resonated with me.
Skype as an instant messaging/presence tool stayed primitive; little to no improvements. I cannot understand why on earth my status cannot be automaticaly set to “busy” or “on the phone” when I’m talking to someone. It is still not possible to show different status to different groups of people (family/colleagues/customers, etc) and this is essential, almost trivial feature for IM products.

Things also get worse. Today I’ve tried to access the chat history with a colleague and computer froze for a minute before doing anything and after that it took couple more minutes to bring up the history since it show all the history since beginning of dawn with that person.

We also had the supernode problem where one of computers have become a supernode and the router could not handle the number of connections, kept dropping the internet connection till we figured out that it was Skype causing high number of connections.

Things add up. I’m no longer sure that we will continue to use Skype as our primary communications tool. Sure I’ll probably continue to use Skype, but it will not be on all the time, and in time I may drop it completely. My colleagues are quite happy with Gtalk (we often switch to it when Skype quality is poor), and it looks like Yahoo/MS have made significant improvements. One of these tools can easily fill the shoes if Skype keeps screwing up and giving us a reason to try them.