Why was it hard to deliver messages to iphone using p2p? I mean I guess they couldn't open ports and listen for messages, but that should have been true for plenty of NATed systems too right?
Your friend now gets reception and will get your message... between a minute and a couple of hours. Most likely when you turn your phone back on, as the p2p network was not designed to store and propagate offline messages.
Meanwhile someone at Whatsapp built a key value pair on a server and if you had reception, you got the messages immediately and reliably. Oh, yeah, because the read and unread message states in Skype also propagated via the p2p network and also got took a while to arrive...
What saves some companies from this is a core DNA that can be interpreted in a very liberal and malleable fashion. For instance, Amazon is about distribution--be it products, bits, computing power. Facebook is about social connection (not P2P or a particular narrowing of tech). Of course, maybe that's just survivorship bias...no one keeps a good directory of the graveyard of corporate DNA that was as similarly broad.
Now whether that is a function of articulating flexible DNA, or the flexibility of the decision makers...I don't know. Either way, fixed mindsets close down adaptivity to new opportunities.
Except this never happened, GroupMe is still a standalone app and pretty much a standalone team. I am not sure why we didn't or could't integrate them, the Microsoft aquisition of Skype, and the subsequent integrating with Lync (and the birth of Skype for Business) probably had higher priority.
Unfortunately "the devil is in the details". Reuse, in this case, hurt the messaging app because of a fundamental difference between connection and connection-less communication. I'm sure the engineers working on the messaging app understood the problems. But, they were most likely not a key part of the decision chain.
You can do P2P on mobile and you can even do P2P with central server fallback without sacrificing reusable components and with standard network protocols. You just have to do the hard work at the lowest layers first and you have to think about the problem from an SDN perspective instead of an app-centric-P2P perspective.
(Intentionally cryptic response, yes. Grin.)
However Skype had no history of running servers. Just keeping the login servers up and running (a handful of them) was enough of a challenge.
Plus when the company's success and revenue was driven by the P2P team and they said the same layer will work for messages... there was no one strong enough to argue.
And when it was obvious that Skype messaging was sub par, the company just went in denial. "We aren't really competing with Whatsapp, because they don't do video" got us another year or two of not doing too much about the root cause.
It was after the Microsoft aquisition when some MS architects told the engineers upfront that p2p and realtime messaging - forget about it.
Plenty of people knew it didn't fly, and it couldn't have been that hard to fix it if you really wanted to do it, if you were prepared to drop p2p. But still it was a hard descision to make.
Why do you think it's like that?
Skype got massive because of video (and audio) calls. That was our main differentiator, and what helped us grow. P2P really excelled there.
Messaging was built as almost an afterthought and supporting feature, piggybacking on whatever infrastructure we already had in place.
And of course it didn't help that there was no one person or team in charge of the user experience who would call out that we have far inferior messaging experience then... any of our competitors, really.
Even when we did - and aquired GroupMe to do something about it - we then still had the false sense of security and not needing to hurry, because user numbers were still growing upwards. And when they slowed down, it was too late.
How long ago was that exactly? From what I remember, ICQ had offline messaging around 1997.
All our email clients do is send it to our email servers. Try sending email out of your own machine. I doubt 10% would reach the destination inbox. The general assumption today is you don't run your own mail server. :(
Any, several couple months later they sold to AOL for something like $250 million. I was living in Chicago at the time and coincidentally the Hancock building had just sold for ~$280 million. I remember thinking that four guys had created as much value in a year as thousands of construction workers and real estate managers had created in three decades.
Their story is very interesting :) , the founders were Arik Vardi, Yair Goldfinger, Sefi Vigiser and Amnon Amir.
We talked to Yair, from what he told us, they were using dial-up at the time, and they had to disconnect or use another phone line to know whether the others were online, and so they discovered a need for a tool to find if somebody was online, and enable communication between connected users.
They weren't very finance-savvy, fortunately for them one of their parents was, and he handled all the fundraising and stuff.
The problem? We had it running 24/7 on work laptops and phones so the messaging issue was less obvious. The typical user started Skype on their desktop, and killed it after a video call. They also killed it from running in the background on their phone because it killed the battery. We just keep charging the phone.
And as we saw issues come up with Skype for our usage patterns, we did focus on those. Did you know that originally the limit of a group size was 300, a random constraint someone added in, and got hardcoded in all the apps? That size was basically chosen because we were pretty sure the largest company Skype group would not grow beyond it. Well, it did a couple years in and we spent more time and effort trying to solve this then a lot of the other stuff. I mean people could not get in to the Tallin office social chat channel and were missing the gossip!
Eating your own dogfood is a good thing - but it also leads to overusing your product and being less critical with it over time.
Also, on top of this the fact that our user base kept growing despite these flaws did give us a false sense of security.
This probably compounded the issue. If the battery-drain never presented itself, users would have been more likely to not turn the application off.
- Network drain - just how much data an app uses is nonobvious for most people, especially that it changes over time.
- System resources drain - low-to-mid-end Android phones are usually pretty underpowered; they can barely lift their OS. Any application running in the background makes using other applications more frustrating. Hence the popularity of auto-killers on Android.
Funny thing the company DNA, P2P is still haunting Skype.
1. You receive a message from someone.
(wait a few hours)
2. You open this tab/read the message
3. The number of unread messages counter doesn't update.
The linux client... well, for the longest time you could be lucky if it would even work. After years of not updating the bundled libraries, they stopped interfacing well with the ones in the system.
And then there was an update, which changed nothing, except for introducing ads on linux and disabling video chat for most cases.
The issue of skype might not be P2P, it sounds more like it was a lack of ability to provide a stable product of any kind. The Android app was also the worst app I had seen for many years. Who the hell seriously builds their own UI toolkit, and then makes it work worse than the one bundled with the OS?