Skype CEO Niklas Zennström is back to taunting telecoms, this time at CeBIT. His rallying cry: “Free is good. Free service is very, very good. We think you cannot charge for phone calls.” Sure its easy to say Free when you are making PC-to-PC calls, but free will come and bite Skype in the behind as more of its consumers start making SkypeOut calls connecting to old fashioned networks. Free also means, free-type reliablity of service. Skype has 29 million users and is currently signing up new users at the rate of 155,000 per day. A million of them use SkypeOut service.
Zennström said that while phone calls are free, the ability to include value-added services would turn Skype from cool to company.
Will Skype real phone numbers as well, as many are speculating? Read Skype Journal for the latest stuff, especially this rant by Stewart Alsop at VoN.
Once more a âparasiteâ? claims the demise of its host. Search for âpurple minutesâ? has been on for quite some time now. Voice mail is not it, free email could be used instead (look at MSN offline messaging to get an idea); voice forwarding could be easily handled by âintelligent end pointsâ?. But it is a good copy if you boldly predict apocalypse in colorful language.