SteveCrow.net

Bloggers around the world have been all over the recent Skype outage that lasted around 30 hours, cutting off phone and other Skype services worldwide. Om Malik blogged about what I think is the bigger issue at Skype: communication with the company.

Skype simply does not care about its customers. Plain and simple. Look at the multitude of feature requests that have gone unaddressed for months (like something as simple as working outgoing Caller ID in the US, which Skype says they won’t implement for “legal” reasons, despite the fact that virtually no other Internet telephony service has a problem with it). Of even more concern are the half-baked features already in the product that simply don’t work. One of the most common complaints is touch-tone dialing during a call. People who use Skype to call IVR’s, voicemail systems, etc., usually can’t traverse the menus because their touch tones are mangled or completely lost in transit. Skype still hasn’t found a way to make their mobile versions work properly, and there are still persistent issues with the ability to receive a call through the SkypeIn service.

One trouble ticket on the DTMF issues has been open for over a year without so much as an acknowledgement from Skype’s engineers. Skype’s dependence on closed-source proprietary protocols makes it impossible for the ready, willing, and able developer community to pitch in and fix it. Rest assured none of these problems would still be around if Skype were to enlist the help of a qualified project manager and a few experienced developers. Right now, I think Skype is being developed out of the back of a U-Haul by some middle school code monkeys using their school laptops.

It’s clear that Skype is unreceptive to the feedback of its users. Skype is completely satisfied watching its users pack up and go to competing services. After all, with every departing user it’s just that many fewer forum posts loaded with heated complaints that Skype’s moderators have to issue canned responses to. Skype has no problem simply ridding itself of customers that aren’t happy by ignoring them until the complaints just go away.

The communication breakdown goes two ways. The recent Skype outage brought virtually zero communication from Skype, as highlighted in Om’s blog. I think this is a pivotal moment for many Skype users. Those who have heard their complaints go unanswered and watched their problems go uncorrected for so long now realize the company simply does not care. And that’s fine, because there are competing services that are far superior functionally and that offer far better support and that actually do care about their customers. That’s why I moved from Skype to Gizmo Project/SIPphone several months ago. It’s not without its flaws, but concerted efforts are being made to fix them and the developers are active in their message boards. Active with constructive feedback and an attitude that they aren’t going to let themselves end up like Skype.

Unfortunately, I doubt the folks at Skype realize how they dropped the ball yet again. The communication issues come as no shock given the company is owned by eBay. How long did it take eBay to finally start cleaning up the scummy practices of some of its sellers? Oh yeah, that’s right. They’re only doing enough of that to be able to say they’re working on it.

I’ve abandoned VoIP altogether in favor of my cell phone and Ma Bell. Neither company has been particularly good about handling user complaints, but at least the damn things work. And that’s more than I can say for Skype.