June 13th, 2005
An Interview with Michael Jackson (no, not him)
I’m referring to the Michael Jackson who is Skype’s director of operations. Not, umm, anyone else by that name.
The in-house Share Skype blog features an interview with Jackson today. Much of the interview is a bit on the fluff side, but this Michael Jackson has some interesting things to say about keeping regulators across the globe up to speed about what the company is and does.
"We have to try and convince the governments and the people who traditionally regulate telephone services that in fact Skype and the new generations of telephone services, or communications services, are rather different to the old systems, which were basically, in one form or another, a telephone that you picked up and used to make calls," Jackson says.
"Skype does a lot more as the regular users will know, and there’s some risk that the regulators don’t understand that and make some rather strange decisions," he adds. "So part of the task is to keep these guys informed of what’s happening so they don’t do the wrong thing or something silly. That’s an interesting task because they want to learn, they’re interested in learning, but they still have the laws and regulations of their particular country to uphold."
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
