TechRadar caught up for an in-depth chat about all things Skype-related this week, with Mike Bartlett, Skype's Director of Product Management for Windows.
Mike, an affable and laid-back South African, gave us the full run-down of what Skype has in store for later this year and for the longer term, offering an exclusive glimpse into the future of VoIP telephony.
TechRadar: Hi Mike, before we get into discussing present and future projects and Skype products, can you give us the quick potted history of the company?
Mike Bartlett: Well, I think fundamentally that Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had a very simple vision, which was to enable people to very easily make free calls over the internet. The key to their success, and Skype's initial success, was that, out of the box, it just worked. You didn't need to sit for hours tweaking firewall settings and configuring this, that and the other. All you did was install Skype, set up your Skype name and you were right there, ready to go.
TechRadar: What about other similar products around prior to Skype's launch?
Mike Bartlett: Well, you had stuff like NetMeeting many years ago, which never seemed to work. I was an ex-programmer and I could never make it work properly. So that's where I think Skype came in and changed the game.
TechRadar: Skype is now pretty well established amongst technophiles. What do you think were the key strategies in establishing Skype and getting it to where it is today?
Mike Bartlett: I think the basic value proposition of it. Just the offer to 'call people for free' initially was what helped start it. There was no SkypeOut or anything like that, originally.
Also, the execution from the original team that started Skype – which was an incredibly smart, committed team. I remember when I first started here three years ago and you walked in and hit this wave of noise and enthusiasm. I've never worked with such a group of smart and committed people before. Getting the right people to build the product was key.
Second to that was then opening up Skype by offering SkypeIn and SkypeOut which allowed you to call people who weren't Skype users on their existing mobile or land-line numbers. Certainly, the uptake on those paid services has been fantastic, as our revenues show! A lot of people don't even use Skype to make free calls. They come to us for the value that our paid services offer.
Also, by nature, Skype is a viral product. If you get started and you want to talk to other people for free, then you have to get those other people on your contact list. So someone who might be an early adopter will get Skype and it goes from there. You can just look at myself as a good example – when I got Skype around four years ago, before I joined, to stay in touch with my parents in South Africa. They are not early adopters, but they installed Skype as soon as I did. So it's just that natural viral model – the fact that you need people to talk to on your contact list, has fuelled the success.
TechRadar: What are your user figures right now?
Mike Bartlett: 338 million registered users, 54% year-on-year growth from July last year. So still pretty strong!
TechRadar: What else do you do in terms of marketing Skype?
Your comments (1) Click to add a new comment
j.a.watson
August 2nd 2008
1. Were you fed the "softball" questions by Skype Marketing as condition of doing the "interview", or do you claim to have thought them up yourself? Did Skype require that you not question or challenge anything he said, or is that your way of conducting an "interview"? Here are a few of the more obvious questions which should have been asked:
- 338 million "registered users": Does this number actually include every Skype account that has been created (and abandoned) since the inception of Skype? Does it include the thousands upon thousands of accounts that are created daily by spammers and pornographers? Is it Skype's intention to deceive by refusing to even try to distinguish between "user accounts" and "registered users" or "active users"?
- The Skype "Director of Product Management" doesn't even know how many Logitech cameras are supported for "High Quality Video", and can only say "around four"? That's not a huge number to try to keep track of - unless your intent is to deceive. That actual number is still three, by the way, as it has been since they first announced HQ Video.
- The competition: Rather than comparing to a lame excuse such as "Windows Live Messenger", and intentionally referring to it by the wrong name (MSN), what about the real competitors - for example, SightSpeed, who just beat Skype out of the Dell Video Chat contract, or ooVoo? Both of whom can do multi-party video calls (to a maximum of 3, 6 or 9 participants depending on version), which Skype has been promising for a long, long time and still hasn't shown any hint of delivering?
- Skype 4.0 Beta: When you refer to "great feedback", is that your term for the near universal revulsion of the new user interface? The most common term for it in the "Skype Community" is "A Screen Full of Ugliness". With two updates since it was first release, not one thing has been changed in the user interface. Is this Skype's way of reacting to user comments?
- User problems, Mr Bartlett [laughs]: Does Mr. Bartlett think that it is amusing to be getting continuously spammed with pornography, solicitations for sex, phishing expeditions and the like, he is very much in the minority. Is this typical of the attitude at Skype to this major problem, and is that why it took them so long to react?
- Business users: What business would want to risk investing in using Skype, considering how the London 0207 phone code users were treated recently when their telephone numbers were withdrawn at the height of the Christmas holiday season with virtually no warning?
- What has Skype done, or are they doing, about service reliability, considering the four-day world-wide outage less than a year ago, and the variety of regional outages since then? What business can afford to risk their telephone availability to a service that might be unavailable at any time?
- Last, but certainly not least, what about the current controversy over back-doors and call monitoring? Has Skype built in access for snoops (in the same way that they built in the "forbidden word" list to appease the Chinese government, or not? "No Comment" is no longer an acceptable dodge for this issue.
Either you missed a good opportunity when conducting your "interview", or rather than an interview this was actually a reprint of a lot of information simply sent to you by the Skype Marketing Department.
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