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Does Skype Matter? Calacanis: Not really; TechCrunch Riley: Yes $1B Worth
Written by Allen Stern - August 17, 2007
"
Does Skype matter?" is the question on the plate this morning. Jason Calacanis, A-list Webulebrity and better-search engine builder, believes no. In a comment left yesterday here on CenterNetworks he said, "Is the Skyp outage that big news? If it happens again, or becomes a trend maybe. But every service goes down at some point... not sure this is as major a news story for folks outside the 'techcrunch 100k.'"
I am not sure what a "techcrunch 100k" is, but if we assume that it's the readership of Techcrunch, I have to disagree. If you review the comments on our Skype Down post 24 hours ago (the first U.S. site to report on the outage), the majority of the 68 comments come from non-webtechies. It is interesting to note that while Jason doesn't believe it's big news, he was quick to create a "stub" page on Mahalo.
Now let's shift gears to a post on Techcrunch, authored by Duncan Riley. Duncan notes that eBay stock dropped $1 billion in market cap yesterday. The post seemed quite ambiguous as to whether Skype was the reason Duncan believes that the stock lost its value. I asked, "Just so I understand Duncan, are you suggesting that the $1 b market cap reduction was due to Skype down today?" Duncan promptly replied with, "the failure of eBay to bounce towards the end of the day when the NASDAQ did (the red line in the chart) would seem to indicate that yes: there is a link." Luckily Mike (Techcrunch Editor) responded shortly thereafter, "There’s no link at all between these as far as I can tell." While a continued Skype outage will affect the books, right now it's a public relations issue.
My answer to the initial question is: Yes, Skype matters. Companies bank on Skype to provide services which they pay for. I have a Skype-In and a Voicemail which I pay for so this outage hurts. Jason and Duncan sit on opposite sides which is a shock considering how much they are tied into the Internet. As the outage continues, other p2p/voip services must be loving it. And it's a wakeup call for those that rely 100% on the service. Have a backup plan just in case it's needed.
FYI, as of 7:30 Eastern, Skype is still down. New note on their blog as of 11:00 GMT.
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What's the overall voip/im client marketshare look like? What slice does Skype have?
I don't know 1 person personally that was effected in any way. We use Skype occasionally to chat with our offices in Ireland, but IM/Land Line/Email are easy backups.
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On a side note, I posted comments about this yesterday, and Jason's comments here eerily reflected my view (mine were time stamped earlier) ... which was essentially "does this Skype outtage even matter?"
Skype is big enough news to be the #1 search at Technorati: see Screen shot showing Technorati's top searches.
Jason can try to rationalize and say this somehow shouldn't be big news, or that it's not important news. That said, a lot of people wanted to find information about it.
The purpose of search engines is to help people find the information they want. Evidently, yesterday, Mahalo failed. Lucky for those searching, Mahalo's failure is irrelevant: they could find what they needed using Technorati or Google.
Michael and I will disagree on this one. The market as a whole at the moment is easily spooked (listen to any expert on this one, thanks to the sub-prime debacle saying boo would nearly do it), Skype's outage is a reasonable explanation for eBay not following the overall market trend for the day. Whether it's a rational or reasonable response (by investors) is certainly open to debate. I'm yet to find any other explanation for eBay stock to have not bounced, and if you see the trading figures there was a massive amount of late trading compared to the rest of the day. Something caused a pile of investors to trade eBay. What else could it be? By all means if someone can find any other explanation I'm more than open to hearing it and even admitting that I'm wrong.
BTW just about to hit 30 hours of downtime. I wonder like you Allen whether people will start looking at alternatives. Credit to Skype though: this is big news as so many people use Skype now. Indeed, they should remain proud of their uptime record to date. In the mean time though I need Skype back :-)
Yep - I wish I could say BooMoo and it will go back up :) Boo = down, BooMoo = up.
I am sure part of the issue now is that everyone is sitting there with the gray connecting icon - so they can't even bring the service back up say 250k users at a time.
I miss Skype :)
I know so many people who have complained about this outtage in the last days, and that's not just people who do web development, or techy stuff.
Really, most folks who have used it once stay with it. There is not so much selling to do, it just works - at least it always did up until now.
I think Skype is one of those apps which is not hard to understand for "regular" folks - unless of course Skype starts to crowd the interface more and more, and more (and f it all up).
Right now you install and it works - they even give you an account "inline" now, which is really so sweet and it literally only takes three minutes to complete the signup. And there is nothing to configure besides - you don't need all this proxy crap, firewall tunneling etc..
So anyway, I have of course to idea how to the judge market value, but does Skype matter to people? Yes it does!
I love Skype.
And no, I don't work for them. ;-)