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Follow UsBut I also recounted my most exciting Skype session ever, way back in 2004. That was 40,000 feet above the Atlantic, from Frankfurt to JFK. I declined the multi-course hospitality of business class, for all I wanted to do was get onto my laptop. Lufthansa was testing out the world's first in-flight Wi-Fi service, and so I had free Wi-Fi for most of the flight. And that meant free calls on Skype.
Also Read: Will Skype now work on Android iPhone or BlackBerry?
It was glitchy; calls would echo and drop; and I didn't have that many friends on Skype at the time. And there was no Skype-out, the paid service that we use to dial out to regular phone numbers today. There was no video. But I didn't care. It was my shortest transatlantic flight ever.
Skype is one of those rare achievements: a product that helped change the world. Not just for the over 140 million who use it every month, generating a (claimed) fifth of the world's voice traffic, but for the billions who don't use it.
If call rates to the USA from India have dropped tenfold in 10 years, you can thank Skype. Some may argue that it's VoIP (voice over Internet protocol) in general, and not just one product. VoIP technology changes voice to small digital packets and sends them out over the Internet just like email.
But it is Skype that is the embodiment of VoIP: its most successful consumer implementation by far, and its best known brand. Using Skype on your PC, and a headset (headphones and mic), you can talk to a friend who is also using Skype, free. If you need to call someone who isn't using a computer at the time, you use the paid service, SkypeOut. Calling a US phone number costs you less than 2 cents a minute, and an India number, under 8 cents a minute.
My Delhi home was 'Skyped' seven years ago, with a $50 box from D-Link connected to the phone line. On our plain old digital cordless phones, when you dialed “00” for an international call, the box switched it to the Skype-out service and dialed the number. It felt like a regular call. So when my mom called her brother in the US, she'd be using Skype, though she had no idea what Skype was: nor did she ever use a computer.
It's this ability to embed Skype into another system that can give you some clue of what Microsoft might do with it.
An obvious step is to integrate Skype into its Windows Phone software. This is not the same thing as downloading a Skype app into your phone, as you can do today. It's about blending it smoothly into the phone, letting you make calls from your phonebook or dialer, routing those calls automatically through Skype. Expect to see this in Nokia phones in a year, thanks to its deal with Microsoft to use Windows as the successor to Symbian in its smartphones.
Nokia already integrates “internet calls” into many handsets in the main dialer, using a system called SIP; it works, but not quite as smoothly. Caveat: The big carriers may not be as happy as customers, about an easy option to bypass their voice call revenue. And in much of the world (unlike in India), carriers decide phone functionality.
Skype would also be supported on Microsoft's gaming products, xBox and Kinect, especially as they get connected over the Internet for network and multiplayer gaming.
Whether it's Google, Microsoft or Oracle, there is little by way of dramatic innovation happening in most large corporations. It's mostly all acquisitions. Some, like Skype, can impact multiple areas, changing the roadmap for key products. For Microsoft, most of those products impacted would be in the business arena, and not consumer tech.