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RIP Skype — you were right about almost everything | Skype saw the future of video and messaging before almost everyone. It also probably never had a chance
Skype saw the future of video and messaging before almost everyone. It also probably never had a chance.
All the way back in 2003, Michael Powell, then the chairman of the FCC and the United States’ chief regulator of the telecom industry, told a roomful of academics and executives at the University of California at San Diego that he had seen the future of communication. Ultimately, it seems that what killed Skype was the very thing that made it so powerful all those years ago: its peer-to-peer technology, borrowed from the file-sharing platform Kazaa (its founders previous startup), that connected users directly to each other instead of hosting everything on the internet. Apple’s iMessage system is probably the closest thing to a spiritual Skype successor in terms of its ability to work with lots of technologies, but that comes with plenty of its own problems and lock-in issues.
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