Why Google Does Not Own Skype
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
This is poison for any organization, and keep in mind that it can (and does) happen in even the smallest of startups. As a leader you need to be vigilant and stamp it out, if you want your company to be healthy.
Edit: And the way you stamp it out is to simply not promote the people who practice it, and promote those who don't. Once it has risen to the higher ranks I agree it is difficult to remove (although it can be done when, for example, Steve Jobs returns to Apple and cleans house).
But hate it or not, this is reality in the corporate world. Knowing the correct technical answer is nowhere near as difficult as getting the powers-that-be to agree with you.
For small startups, perhaps you can stamp it out. At large corporations, it isn't quite that easy.
What techniques, specifically, should they have used to get their point across?
> There's nothing wrong with hacking deciders
> to get them to make good decisions
1. You are always right.
2. The deciders are a bunch of idiots.
Maybe I'm a little jaded, but that sounds pretty darned good to me. I would call it "politics" if the people involved did things for selfish reasons, hid their true motivations, spread misinformation to support their cause, or conspired to avoid oversight. When someone does things for the right reasons, is open about his reasons, and doesn't override other people using authority he doesn't have, it's hard to see him as underhanded. So the guy who made the decision stage-managed a meeting to dramatize his reasons for deciding as he did -- so what? The guy presenting the slide deck hid his opinion about the deal, but only for dramatic purposes, and only at a point where his opinion had ceased to matter because the exec in charge had already made up his mind.
This is a very revealing article. Google is more dysfunctional than I thought.
Maybe I am naive, and this is how things really get done, but regardless of which side I might have been on during this meeting, he is no longer trusted.
politics are more important than sound ideas
that are good for the business
Google cannot be different in that regard. They can't work with a flat organization in which Joe Sixpack has the same credibility as an early employee -- they are too big for that.
The only way such a corporation can improve (over the rest) is to build that hierarchy based on better metrics than the rest, to avoid situations in which big responsibilities fall on complete morons that can kiss ass. Such a corporation would also need to maintain the number of layers to a minimum.
Politics in big corporations are inevitable, which isn't necessarily bad, it's just a different environment than in a startup.
Technical people seem to lay out arguments that are sound, but just aren't convincing or appropriate for the audience at hand. This is why shitty technology can win out when the customer lacks the time to make an informed decision, and makes the perfectly rational decision to go with the more convincing pitch.
And that's just it: decision makers don't have time to go through a thorough, completely objective, scientific argument. So, you either do what you need to get things done in what you feel is the right way, or you don't. There's nothing wrong with hacking a meeting, so long as the hack benefits the company, or at least is done in the company's best interest. As with software, the only bad hacks are those that benefit the hacker at the expense of the organization.
I agree with your first two paragraphs.
If anyone ever wants to know why I don't work at Google any more and why I would decline their offer if they asked me to come back, I would point to this example.
If you thrive in that kind of environment where you "plant hand grenades so you can de-rail the deal" by all means go there. I don't. Every place in Google I looked at had this sort of culture.
I had serious problems making sense of that. I guess they mean that since Skype is peer to peer, that leaves too few places for Google's server-oriented infrastructure to inject advertisements?
I think the underlying problem is voice-recognition technology. I read somewhere (sorry, no link right now) that Google is using Google voice to hone in on their voice recognition technology, which we are now starting to see in Android. P2P kind of side-steps the Google servers (or, to phrase it more appropriately, avoids the MITM), thereby not providing any real use to them.
Remember, Google's business model is data. Control, collection, mining of lots and lots of data. P2P just doesn't facilitate that, so that's why Google chose to reject it.
It's just that the server part is now [theoretically] a bunch of servers in different locations [theoretically] to allow failover. Theoretically.
And yes, I'm almost certain that's Google's problem with the Skype model: no convenient place to stick ads. (OK, sure, the client app could just get ads from Google, but if the p2p voice protocol works w/o Google servers, you can write a client that avoids the ads.)
Protocol is closed and little progress has been made for reverse-engineering -- which I think would also be illegal, since the data is encrypted and then you're at odds with the DMCA (IANAL btw -- the DMCA grants a safe harbor for reverse engineering, but that hasn't worked out so well for DRM).
To my knowledge there is no alternative Skype client, not even for the IM part -- Pidgin has integration with the official Skype client and piggybacks on top of it. If you don't have the Skype client installed and running, Pidgin doesn't work.
P2P in this particular case is really not the freedom-giver technology that allows you to workaround Skype's servers. If Skype wishes to serve adds to you, or to track you, there's really not much you can do about it.
I believe the DMCA outlaws circumvention of copyright enforcement mechanisms, not encryption. I don't see why the Skype protocol would have any such mechanism.
http://recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part1.pdf
http://recon.cx/en/f/vskype-part2.pdf
Looking at how complex it is, and considering that Skype probably have more obfuscation and crypto ready to roll out if anyone cracks it, I can see why nobody's implemented a compatible client:
Edit: this is pointed out in the linked slides.
This quote intrigues me the most. Is peer-to-peer really bad, and uses a lot of bandwidth, or is it just bad for Google?
I don't know exactly how much bandwidth Skype uses, but it has been the most reliable way of doing video-chats for me, even on the slow Internet connection I'm using.
If we take, for example, an application like Bitcoin, it uses a minimal amount of data transfer because all it's doing is coordinating transactions and mining.
If take a simple use case like P2P text chat, would the bandwidth costs be all that bad compared to a cloud or client-server model?
If it's all encrypted P2P and supernodes aren't centrally located but randomly distributed throughout the Skype-net.
They couldn't place ads without rewriting the P2P to have more intercept points.
If it is about money, then I think Chan's point does hold. Google would be buying a money losing venture that doesn't fit with their own monetization model and would take years to integrate if at all.
More generally, this is known in economics as the agency problem of the firm. (I Googled for some handy references, but I'll let readers who are interested seek out the references that best fit their own background, as I wasn't completely satisfied with any of the links I found.) Employees of companies are naturally looking out for their own individual interests, as well as (the company's shareholders hope) the higher good of the company. Setting up company policies to provide incentives for shareholder-value-maximizing decisions is not easy, especially when many of those decisions involve predictions of an uncertain future, in which outcomes for individuals may differ from the outcome for the company.
"As Chan helped with due diligence, even going to Europe to see Skype firsthand, he became convinced that the purchase was a bad idea for Google. He concluded that one of Skype's key assets -- its peer-to-peer technology -- was a mismatch for Google, which worked on the newer paradigm of cloud computing.
"'The worst thing about peer-to-peer is that it doesn't work well with Google,' Chan told me during an amazing interview for 'In the Plex' in February 2010. 'Peer-to-peer just eats up your bandwidth, right, it's like the old technology.'"
What an odd article.
But that's just me.
Data centers and capable employees are not reasons one way or the other (unless the company suffers from NIH syndrome); they are simply facts. Loyal users are, on the other hand, a consideration - but there are fundamental differences between Google's customers and Microsoft's particularly in regards to Microsoft's B2B orientation versus Google's ad revenue based model.
While peer to peer is problematic for Google's core revenue stream which requires consumers to frequently access Google's servers, peer to peer is perfectly consistent with Microsoft's core business wherein customers' contact with Microsoft's data centers is relatively infrequent and intermittent - e.g. Microsoft's revenue model works if a customer only contact with Microsoft servers is once a month on patch Tuesday.
In the long run, Microsoft can certainly screw the pooch on the deal. However, the purchase leaves no doubt that Microsoft sees telephony as far more than mobile. One could argue that they have made Google Voice a distant second in the space, e.g. very limited geographic availability for user accounts.
Also the MS brand does not command immediate trust in many, so convincing users to use an MS product over something else is not as easy as it once was. As well as the code, people and infrastructure they've got the brand, a name that a lot of the general public already "trust" as they already use a product carrying that brand.
So how is Microsoft competing?
In the enterprise, they embed the phone (Lync) technology pervasively and throughout their platform. So, without doing anything, I can click to call from SharePoint, email or SMS from an Office app, videochat from PowerPoint. They're exposing the communications mechanisms everywhere.
IMO, this Skype thing is intended to do the same thing, but on the consumer and SMB side. Unified communications for the millions of people using Hotmail/Live and Skype -- and for the millions of business people who DO NOT have UC today. Skype gives them consumers in Europe and small business everywhere.
One of the holes in Office 365 is a voice offering for smaller companies -- the pricepoint for the full Exchange/Lync suite is really high unless you have 10,000+ seats. So you can give small companies with little money access to unified communications, buy accessories like handsets and speakerphones from the same partner (Polycom) and eventually graduate into the enterprise offerings.
That may be less than Skype (I don't know), but Skype is mostly redundant tech for them.
This was definitely a brand purchase - and such purchases may be worth it, but I can't think of a single product that Microsoft bought and that doesn't scream "Microsoft" all over -- so whatever trust in Skype consumers have, those consumers that don't trust Microsoft will probably leave Skype at some point.
Their first 2 announcements after the take-over will probably be about the integration with Windows Live (whatever that means these days) and the cancellation of the Linux client.
I doubt this sort of trade-off even has to be voiced - it's just implicitly understood. Although in this case, I think the anecdote backfired - Chan seems really smart, but also somewhat manipulative.
I sincerely hope that it wasn't PowerPoint...