Skype and Story of My life
I has been nearly six years since I first fell in love with Skype. It was a tiny little company with a buggy software and a few thousand users. I liked it so much that I started forcing my friends to sign up for it. Many of them resisted, but I persisted.
Context & Ripple Effects
Om Malik's relationship with Skype runs through the corpus: he was praising the company back in October 2007 (I come to Praise Skype, not to Bury Them), mapping its role in the new workspace that same summer, and by December 2010 arguing that persistent group chats were one of its most underrated features. An April 2010 GigaOM rundown of the numbers made the point that the buggy startup he fell for had become genuinely big.
What has changed by May 2011 is that Skype is no longer just a product story. Days earlier Reuters reported — unconfirmed — talks with Facebook and Google over a partnership or outright acquisition, and this year alone Skype closed its combination with Qik and switched on Home-tab advertising. The post reads as an early-adopter's valuation memo, written while the company's future ownership is openly in question.
First-order effects
- The rumored Facebook and Google talks recast Skype from a communications tool into an asset being priced, which is exactly the lens this retrospective applies to its six-year arc.
- Skype enters that window carrying fresh commercial commitments — Qik video improvements promised on Sprint and T-Mobile devices and new Home-tab ad inventory — that any acquirer would inherit.
Second-order effects
- If Facebook or Google buys Skype, rival platforms lose access to its calling fabric and are pushed toward building or buying their own real-time voice and video stacks rather than licensing them.
- The monetization pivot — advertising plus the Qik integration — signals to partners like carriers that free calling is becoming a bundled feature inside larger deals, pressuring standalone VoIP pricing.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward consumer communication services being valued primarily as strategic infrastructure for large platforms, where network effects built over years matter more than current revenue.
- It also foreshadows closer scrutiny of acquired consumer products' operational debt — the May Mac client vulnerability that took a patch cycle to close shows how quickly quality and security issues surface when a company sits in deal negotiations.
The trend: Consumer internet companies with large installed networks are increasingly priced as acquisition targets by major platforms, turning their user goodwill into part of the deal case.