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Comment by gregdoesit | Hacker News Reader

Exactly. In hindsight we should have just built a separate messaging layer with a server backend like everyone else was doing.

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.

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I hope everyone within Skype used it as your main communication tool. If you did, the problem would have been so obvious. Not so long ago, it was revolutionary to be able to send messages to someone even when they were offline. However, once someone implements it every other chat app had very little time to do that. IMHO, there is nothing inherent about big companies from reacting quickly. It usually boils down to the culture of the company that's the cause. Call it "Bias for action" or "Ask forgiveness, not permission" or whatever you want to call it - a company (big or small) that allows people to go quickly fix an issue or try another solution instead of talking endlessly about it, well aware that there is a chance for failure, is the one that's likely to succeed.

> Not so long ago, it was revolutionary to be able to send messages to someone even when they were offline.

How long ago was that exactly? From what I remember, ICQ had offline messaging around 1997.

We used to have this technology called email which seemed pretty cool. You could even embed photos of your cat.

Did they ever fix the spammer problem on it?

Yes.

It's not realtime, though. You send your message and the other person gets it... in a few minutes.

Did the implementation depend on one or more intermediate servers always being online? If so, it isn't revolutionary.

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. :(

It did. I remember wondering why all the "successors" didn't have that "basic" feature

I was one of the first 100k ICQ users. I was working on a similar idea at the time and so tried every chat client that I came across. I was really impressed with ICQ and somehow tracked down the phone number of one of the developers. I called him. He was an Israeli living with his sister in NYC. I think there were three other people involved, all developers. We chatted for a bit about the software and I remember telling him I was impressed.

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.

I actually talked to one of the developers recently thanks to an university course (Economics of Innovation).

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.

Of course we used it as our main communication tool. With each other and within the company.

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.

>"They also killed it from running in the background on their phone because it killed the battery."

This probably compounded the issue. If the battery-drain never presented itself, users would have been more likely to not turn the application off.

Not really. Two more reasons to kill Skype immediately after use:

- 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.

What is the fix here that does not involve intermediate servers? The xmpp client conversations asks you to opt out the app from aggressive battery optimization in Android Lollipop. I tried saying no and killing the app. Messages took over two minutes to arrive while I was using the device (not the app). I don't think there is an easy fix. This is why Google Cloud Messaging makes sense but the problem is that now Android is coupled with Google services. :(

I'm not sure if this story has been told this plainly elsewhere, but it probably should. I know plenty of people who got very paranoid of Skype after MS bought them.

I think the denial is the important lession here.

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?

I think it was denial that messaging itself would be more inportant then video calling.

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.

Thanks for sharing. I can definetly see how that happens.

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