eBay Names New Skype CEO

So, eBay has finally meandered their way around to naming a new CEO for Skype, many months after the original founders of Skype showed that they were smart enough to know when to take the money and run. This one comes on board with lots and lots of flowery statements about how honored he is to be joining a team that makes the best product in the world, and how important it is to understand that Skype's "beloved users" are the most important thing in the universe to them.

If he is actually interested in improving the currently hopeless situation at Skype, there are really only a few things that he needs to do:

- Get a Customer Service Department. Give them a phone number, and an email address through which they can be contacted. This is nothing short of absolutely disgraceful at the moment.

- STOP blocking paying customers accounts for no apparent reason, and with no explanation, ESPECIALLY when the amount of money in question in $10, which is a microscopic pittance to you, but being able to make a phone call to distant family and loved ones can make all the difference in the world to your customers.

- If you absolutely positively must block accounts on occasion, for good reason, then at least simply block the customer from adding more credit to their account, let them continue using the money you have already taken from them! When you block the account, let the customer know IMMEDIATELY that you have done so, and why. In the civilised world, taking money and then refusing to provide a service without explanation is called "stealing", and that is not something one does to "dear beloved friends".

- Stop putting all of your development effort into porting Skype to anything and everything, and concentrate on getting the versions that you are already distributing to work properly. I fully expect to wake up tomorrow and read about Skype being available on my coffee machine, and by next week it will probably be on my vacuum cleaner. Meanwhile, Skype for Windows doesn't like my graphic card, so it doesn't show incoming video, it disagrees with my webcam software, so every time I make a call my speakers get muted, it doesn't like my audio drivers so frequently when I start it I get a BSOD crash, and the "presence reporting" is worse than a joke, it is not even able to give me a reasonable hint as to whether my contacts are online or not.

That's not a long "action list", is it? Getting these points fixed would be a massive step forward - and nearly impossible, based on their actions over that past couple of years.

jw 25/2/2008