News Skype founders want it back

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/bits/2009/04/13/skype-founders-want-it-back/1

Rumour has it that the original founders of voice over IP service Skype are looking to buy the company back from eBay after selling it off in 2005.

 

Well if they do get it back I hope the do something about the latest version. I took one look at version 4 and went straight back to 3.8!

 

I believe I still run some v2.x. Hardly ever use Skype these days. Started off like a cool gadget, then somehow I lost interest. Didn't really get better with all the accusations flying around how Skype would cooperate with the NSA and the like.

 

Terrorist circles the world over had to find a new way to communicate, damn them!

 

Yep, hope they can get rid of the crap-fest that is Skype 4.x
It's WAY too bloated now, for not much increase by way of user-level enhancements.

 

I do wonder how many of those are active/actually use it. How many people do you know who use Skype? I know only one person that actively uses it ...

 

my room mates and i use it as communicator as keeping the door open and shouting during gaming isn't very effective. usually 4 to 5 hours long gaming session with Sins of Solar Empire.

i love skype, voice quality is fantastic and very low bandwidth useage. and i love it even more now that it's on iphone

 

A friend of mine, his girlfriend is from South Korea. She uses it to talk to her parents back home for cheap. And he uses it to talk to her when she visits there the summer.

 

Only time I ever used Skype was to call my brother when he worked in America.

 

LOL, they get paid ~$3B for it and could conceivably get it back for a fraction of that. Wow, what a deal!!! That's alost as good a deal that Larry Silverstein got for buying the WTC buildings for a few billion (a couple weeks before 9/11) and then getting paid double that from the insurance companies.

If they get Skype back they will be my heroes.

 

So, sell ebay a product for a (vastly inflated) price, but shaft them down the road with licensing of the underlying technology? Why are IT companies such smegheads?

 

I use Skype to call my GF on my PSP at work.

Better not to tie up business phone lines when clients might be trying to call; better not to pay cell prices for gabbing worldwide when one's main use of one's cell is as a walkie-talkie.

(My boss is a fanatical gamer, so no one balks at the sight of a PSP when our workload is nonexistent.)

 

Its with all those nice tools. It starts as a simple to use, fast little program. And with each version update they fill it with stuff they think the user needs. For example Skype, MSN, ICQ, ACDsee and even virus scanners.

 

...That is some very cute business there.

I use Skype as often as most people think about sex, so if they make the program suck less, then I'm all for it.

Latest version is god-awful.

 

Skype on mobile devices like android, iPhone? That could grow the revenue stream by miles in the future.