Skype Roundup

I'm a pretty active Skype user and read many articles and blog posts regarding Skype because I'm fascinated with the what they've done with regards to making VoIP something easy to use for the guy on the street.

It turns out that I'm not the only one interested. Whenever I see an article about Skype, there you'll find JA Watson with a negative, aggressive rambling about the evil Skype. (I'd post this under my real name, but frankly this guy seems pretty obsessive and I don't have the time for a stalker) For JA Watson - its become personal.

Granted, Skype is not perfect. But who is? And for all the cool stuff that Skype lets me do - for free no less- let's me forgive and forget any loooong waits in tech support. Letting me see my daughter on webcam 1000 miles away - its worth it.

I don't know if JA uses Skype, but if he does, I'd wish that he write a few lines on why, how and what he thinks works well. "Fair and balanced" - no need to be a cheerleader, no need to be a hater.

Kind regards, Anonymous.

Posted by jahap on Oct 1, 2008 10:01 AM

You’re absolutely right on the downloads front – on average, over the last five years, half a million people have downloaded Skype every day. The rate varies over time, of course, and we publish an RSS feed of our download and ‘users online now’ statistics, so you can see for yourself just how many people are downloading and using Skype at any given moment.

Updated by peteratskype on Oct 1, 2008 12:03 PM

@jahap - I'm glad to hear that Skype works for you, and lets you see your daughter on webcam 1000 miles away. However, your situation is exactly one of the reasons that I write about Skype as much as I do. I have been in it, and I have dealt with a lot of other people who have been in it. What would your opinion be if Skype did NOT work for you, and you were not able to see your daughter? What if you then tried to get help from Skype, and the responses you got (if you were fortunate enough to get any at all) were so pathetic and irrelevant that they contributed nothing to solving the problem, despite repeated attempts? You would end up angry, depressed, confused and feeling a lot more isolated by that 1,000 mile separation. Meanwhile, there are a lot of very good alternatives to Skype, which have not only products that are at least equally as good, but also have invested in a support organization for their customers. Those are the ones who REALLY "love their users.

That is only one example. Now consider those who have actually paid for services from Skype, and then had their accounts blocked for no apparent reason, and likewise get no response, or nonsense responses, from Skype "support". Once again, they are unable to communicate with their loved ones, which may well have been the reason that they installed Skype and gave them money to begin with. How do you suppose they feel?

What about the customers who have put money into their Skype accounts, and had them hacked into and the credits drained - and in some cases had even more money taken from the PayPal or Credit Card accounts associated with their Skype accounts? How do you think they feel? Skype's only response to their situation has been to say that they "should be more careful", apparently trying to blame the customer for the loss.

Yes, I have used Skype. I used it quite a lot until about a year ago, and I was involved on the Skype User Forums in helping others to get it installed and working properly. I personally stopped using it, and went looking for alternatives, when my partner pointed out to me that 90% of my Skype conversations consisted of "can you hear me now?", "can you see me now?". I do, in fact, still have Skype installed on one of my Linux test machines, because there are still one or two people with whom I had contact via Skype that I haven't been able to establish any alternative with. But I use it for text chat only, and it still gives me terrible problems, because the Skype presence reporting system is so unreliable that I never really know if my contacts are online or not, or often when I know they are online I am still not able to send a text message because Skype says they are offline.

I can't write any lines at all about what I think works well on Skype, because I don't think anything at all does. In my opinion the only thing Skype has going for them is a very large installed user base. Everything else they have or can do exists in competitors products, and generally works at least as well if not dramatically better. One good example is their much-touted "High Quality Video", which after nearly a year is STILL limited to only three specific "anointed" webcams. If you don't have one of those three, you're out of luck; even if you do have one, you have to cross your fingers and pray that Skype will deem your computer, internet connection and your contact's computer worthy of their HQ mode, otherwise you are still out of luck, and with no explanation of why. Meanwhile SightSpeed and ooVoo both have equivalent video quality and their implementations are not tied to a specific list of cameras, and are significantly easier to use and understand.

I can, however, write about what I see as their weaknesses, in addition to their useless customer support. They don't have a web browser client (both SightSpeed and ooVoo do, and TokBox and SnapYap are both entirely browser based). Presence reporting is unreliable, and often seemingly random; this makes it difficult to contact others, and can cause text messages and contact requests to be delayed by hours, days, weeks or more. Video freezes, or is just black or missing completely. Skype blames this on various display drivers, but they have never tried to produce a list of drivers and versions which are known to work, or not work, or anything else that might be of use. Skype video "optimizing" fights with Logitech's RightLight adjustments, producing generally poor and erratic video. Skype's "solution" is to uninstall a major part of the Logitech software. Likewise, Skype's audio adjustments cause confusion with Logitech's "Communication Helper" task, which often results in no audio input or output. Again, their "solution" is to disable the Logitech software (it's always someone else's fault). Last, but certainly not least, Skype's space is now infested with spammers and pornographers who are sending a never-ending stream of contact requests, and chat messages if you don't specifically change your security settings to disallow them, and Skype has shown no interest in doing anything to try to cut them out.

The bottom line is, I write about Skype because I think it is important to let people know that it has problems. Lots of problems, and problems which Skype has obviously not fixed for a very long time. At the same time, I would like to let people know that there are good alternatives to Skype, which will accomplish the same things that Skype does, and which have user-friendly support when something doesn't work or goes wrong. For those who choose to install Skype, I would like to let them know that when it doesn't work they are not alone, and they are probably not to blame.

When people ask me why I write so much negative about Skype, or as in your case why I am not more "fair and balanced" about them, I simply ask them if what I am writing is true or not. If it is true, that is all I am interested in; if it is not true, I would be very happy for someone to point that out to me. When anything I write is proven not to be true, or to have been fixed, I will stop writing about it. But having the COO of Skype write in a comment to my blog that they have an "action plan" and a "roadmap" to fix customer support will not make any difference to me, and since it is now several months later, and the support is every bit as abysmal as it has ever been simply tells me that time has proven me to be right.

If Skype were to make some reasonable effort to actually put a customer support organization in place, and to see to it that the answers which get sent out are not total nonsense, that would be a huge step in the right direction. If they would put some effort into fixing some of the bugs that have existed in their program for a year or more, sometimes for several years, that would be another huge step forward. It there were to do those sorts of things, then I wouldn't have anything to write about.

jw 1/10/2008

Posted by J.A. Watson on Oct 1, 2008 12:56 PM