October 1st, 2007
Did Skype's two-day outage in August help seal ousted Skype exec's fate?
That’s not only what I am starting to think, but that’s what Forrester analyst Sally Cohen seems to believe as well.
In tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal, the noted analyst is described as saying that because of the two-day outage, and its slow explanation, Skype seemed to nail down the impression that “such a service can be ancillary,” rather than a replacement service for a standard phone line.
Skype says that in some of their “don’t use us for 911″ documentation as well. There’s a difference, though. For consumers, fine print docvumentation is one thing- a kind of understandable CYA. But two days of down time really makes an impression.
When incidents such as these take place in a backdrop of continually slashing prices, it gets to be kind of a negative perfect storm. So maybe although IDC numbers dictate a spike in U.S. in Internet phone users from 4.2 million users in 2005 to 16.3 million this year, trend lines from Forrester that note average revenue per Internet phone subscriber has dropped to $29 a month from $42 two years ago is more telling.
“The growth in the market doesn’t match the hype,” Cohen is quoted as saying. On the whole, “consumers have been very slow to catch on.”
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
