Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Skype Marks 10th Anniversary

It hardly seems possible that we are upon the 10th anniversary of the launch of Skype on Aug. 29, 2003. A decade later, 300 million users make two billion minutes of online video calls a day.

Perhaps to mark the occasion, there is news that Skype is working to create 3D calling. That would be a welcome bit of innovation for a service that some think has not innovated so well in quite some years.

“In some ways Skype is a victim of its own success,” said Taavet Hinrikus, the company’s first employee. “It stopped innovating. The last meaningful thing to be launched by Skype was video calling in 2005.”

Others might argue that acquisition first by eBay, then by Microsoft, explains Skype’s inability to compete with messaging apps, for example.

Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype in 2011.

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