MappingTheWeb //

Skype goes down. The world stops. A gazillion blogs post about the outage. Boo hoo. Life goes on…

The majority of Skype users don’t even pay for the service, so it’s pretty hard to point the finger at a company who doesn’t receive compensation from the majority of its users.

In reality, we use Skype because it facilitates our lives and/or saves us loads of money. We should be thanking them. But a greedy few choose not to address this.

On the other side, however, I do feel some sympathy for those who pay to use premium Skype services. They are customers. Such a lengthy outage is inexcusable. If I were a paying customer, I’d be pissed off too.

Another point to note is that Skype is used extensively as a conferencing tool by many small companies and start-ups. These companies live and die by the service. It is very common to see an executive meeting scheduled around a Skype conference call. This free alternative is great, but a paid service offers more reliability and support should a mishap present itself. The companies that use Skype’s free conferencing service have no right to be upset if the service goes down, unless of course they are paying customers.

One thing is for certain: even if Skype does go down for a couple days or even a week, people won’t switch to an alternative service. Why? Because all their friends still use Skype. They would have to presuade their entire contact list to switch over to achieve maximum value. Is this going to happen? Not likely.

I guess what I am trying to say is that if you aren’t willing to pay, you can’t expect a perfect service.

Are we too dependent on free services like Skype? Is an outage acceptable to a user who doesn’t pay? Is it OK to demand a lot from a free service?