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The World Continued On, So I Guess Not
When many first heard of the skype outage (I was one of the last as I have been too busy lately to even sign-on or use an ip phone for that matter) they were quick to note the pending doom and gloom. What transpired though, was that there was not much coverage of this event outside of the industry and even for those of us within the industry, it was not life altering. Hmm…
So What Does This Mean?
It would seem that the lack of doom and gloom caused by the skype outage is a sign that skype is not being used as a primary, mission-critical means of communication. Businesses and individuals are most certainly using skype, but they are doing it in a manner that simply augments their normal voice service (cheaper LD, etc). Either this or everyone had a fail-over plan, which in my experience will never be true because most people do not understand the value in doing so.
If We Can Live Without Skype Is It Still That Disruptive?
The fact that most simply migrated to another communications choice, leads me to believe that Skype is not a most have communications solution. It merely another choice in a long list of available options. Sure some folks were hurt by the outage, we had trouble getting ahold of a developer in the UK who uses Skype to communicate with us, but even still if the net effect of the Skype outage is “who cares” where does that leave Skype? And what does it say about it’s importance (or lack thereof) in the Voice over IP and communications industry as a whole?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
As of noon EDT today at least 6.2 million people cared about the skype outage; that’s how many are back online now that the problem has been resolved. Looking forward to skype’s statement Monday about what caused it and how they are dealing with the situation going forward.
Jim, just because 6.2 million people were back on skype does not mean it impacted their lives to the extent that say, the PSTN going down across the world for 48 would, right?
I do believe some people were affected, but the net of the outage does not seem to be all that terrible…as many predicted it would.
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