Yes, I know. The Skype fan girl declaring the death of her beloved tool may feel a bit weird. Shouldn’t I fight until the last call for it? Well, not really. The funny part about all of that is now as I am declaring my willingness to switch to an alternative, long time users of virtual classrooms are switching to Skype. But I guess that’s the curse of being part of the tech ecosystem.
As always I would like to give you an overview on some of my reasons why I think Skype is dead.
First of all, I don’t think Skype will go away in the near future or lose market share. I am pretty sure that the opposite will be true. With the recent integration into Facebook and its more than 700 million users (Skype has had about 70 million when Mircrosoft acquired it) there is lots of potential of getting new users. And that’s one of the problems right away.
We all noticed that Skype has got more problems the more users it added over the past months. That’s natural growing pains, the same Twitter suffered from two years ago. So, if we add another 10, 20 or even 50 million users to it, the issues are naturally going to worsen before anything could improve. Call quality is going to get lower at busy hours or the service might go down entirely etc making teaching online via Skype an unpleasant experience for everyone involved and the service somewhat unreliable.
Then we recently learned that Skype’s CEO Tony Bates is finally thinking aloud of in-call advertisements. In fact, he can imagine a lot of different options. I already wrote about this brilliant idea last year and interestingly Leo Laporte announced on Sunday after his move to the new TWiT studios that from now on he will be using Vidyo for all guest calls on the show and not Skype anymore as he did over the past couple of years.
Sure, there is always the option of paying for a business account but that does not necessarily mean that you would be save from the growing pains, especially as we saw almost the service down twice the past couple of weeks .
But the number one reason why I am slowly but surely moving away from Skype is that it is an old technology, doomed to die out. I think the watershed moment for me was an article on Wired in May. In the article Steven Levy, the author of In the Plex, tells the story of Wesley Chan. Chan back in 2009 was the product manager of Google Voice and by that time Google was about to buy Skype from eBay. Being part of the team that took care of the acquisition, Chan came to the conclusion that Skype would be a mismatch for Google.
“The worst thing about peer-to-peer is that it doesn’t work well with Google,” Chan told me during an amazing interview for In the Plex in February 2010. “Peer-to-peer just eats up your bandwidth, right, it’s like the old technology.” So if Google bought Skype, Chan concluded, it would have to rewrite the entire Skype platform. Worse, buying Skype would have involved an extensive review process by the government, involving the Department of Justice or the FCC or both. Chan figured that it would take 18-24 months to get through that process, during which Google would be at a standstill in the space. “It would’ve been disastrous,” he said.
But as Google and especially Eric Schmidt wanted to make that deal happen, he had to be creative to derail the deal. More about that over at Wired.
Aside from that, Skype has other serious issues like being de facto illegal in many countries, including France where I’m living. The problem is that Skype In/Out is acting like a telecom service but Skype is arguing that they were not.
So, what are the alternatives? The answer is WebRTC.
WebRTC is a free, open project that enables web browsers with Real-Time Communications (RTC) capabilities via simple Javascript APIs. The WebRTC components have been optimized to best serve this purpose.
WebRTC is pushed by Google and open source which means that any developer can use the platform to build their own applications or plugins. The main idea is to implement video calling functions into any browser. No need to download and install clients on your computer and it does not use Flash like popular TinyChat.
There are of course alternatives that work already today. One of them are Google+ Hangouts. You could simply create a circle with your student in Google+ and then start a Hangout in which you can teach, share or even watch YouTube videos together. I already played around with Hangouts a bit and I really like the simplicity and overall quality of the video and sound. In a couple of months from now this might have turned into no. 1 solution for online video lessons.
Of course, Skype has been hiring a team of web developers which might point into the direction of dropping the peer-to-peer technology sometime down the road but I believe that WebRTC is the future. Tied to that I also see the browser as the dominating tool of the next decade. More about that in another post.
