I posted an article two days ago entitled "Skype versus Gizmo5." A number of obviously satisfied Skype customers sent e-mails to me with a more or less common theme: this would be a terrible thing for those who use Skype daily to talk with friends and relatives around the world.
I disagree.
To be sure, Skype shutting down would be inconvenient for its 40 milliuon users. However, it would not be catastrophic. The company has several competitors that provide more-or-less the same services. I suspect all the competitors are "waiting in the wings," reading the news, and hoping that their biggest competitor does get shut down. Skype being forced to shut down would be great news for all of Skype's competitors; Gizmo5, Vonage, Yahoo Voice, Google Talk, Google Voice, MagicJack, Net2Phone, icall, ipKall, TruPhone, and others.
If Skype is shut down, every Skype customer could move to a competitive service and be up and running within minutes. The only difficulty would be in picking a service that is also used by all the people that you wish to call. Most of the services provide free calls to their own customers who call the same company's other customers. They typically do not provide free calls to customers of a different service. (One exception is Google Voice which also provides free calls to Gizmo5 users.)
The current legal wrangling involves proprietary technology that is used only by Skype. Since it is proprietary to Skype, that specific technology is not used by any of Skype's competitors and they would all be unaffected by the legal dispute.
Also, let's not overlook the fact that Skype is owned by a company with great financial resources: eBay. If the lawyers do succeed in shutting down Skype's present service based on a proprietary technology, I suspect Skype's programmers could move the entire service to the industry-standard SIP protocol within a few weeks. It would take longer to install the required hardware to provide SIP based service, but it is all standard, off-the-shelf hardware already used by many companies.
Finally, there is still one more option: if Skype is shut down, parent company eBay could simply purchase one of the smaller competitors who already use SIP protocol and simply slap the Skype brand name onto the newly-acquired service. eBay probably has the financial reserves to acquire one or more of its competitors.
I hope that Skype remains in business for a long time. After all, I use Skype most every day. However, I do know that if Skype does go away, it will be a minor inconvenience. You and I will still have plenty of choices.
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