The Skype Effect
Seamus McCauley writes: “There’s still a little way to go, culturally, technically and administratively, before we see a mass substitution of Skype for fixed and mobile telephony, but I have no doubt it’s only a matter of time. As Dylan says…it’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.”
[tease]
Skype is still new for most people. It’ll take a while for everyone except hardcore geeks to trust it enough for all their calls and be comfortable chucking out their landline and/or mobile.
James Enck writes about Skype not being simply a substitute for plain old telephone service (POTS):
[tease]
Ease-of-use, audio quality, presence, multi-chat, file transfer, etc., all came together to form a “killer cocktail” experience for the user, resulting in something not necessarily recognisable to the industry as a competing “voice service”. It was/is something else, another behavior - purple minutes vs. grey minutes, as Jeff Pulver might say.