Nine years ago today, August 29, 2003, the first version of Skype was made publicly available. Now in 2012 Skype celebrates it’s 9th birthday – and first birthday as part of Microsoft… and it’s still disrupting telecommunications.

Four years ago on Skype’s 5th birthday I wrote at great length about how Skype has changed telecommunications and last year I wrote a retrospective as well – both of those posts still stand… Skype has only added more capabilities over the time. Skype is still one of the only applications that I can say I personally use each and every day. It’s critical to what I do.

As I look back on my last year of writing about Skype, I’d note that they’ve finally gotten the app to work more similarly across operating systems, introduced amazing video quality, crossed over 40 million simultaneous users, made yet another attempt at a developer program and continually improved the Skype-on-mobile-device experience. Skype has also added a deeper Facebook integration, embedded Skype into more TV and other consumer devices, rolled out Skype on Windows Phone and continued to improve their video offerings.

But what comes next?

What will we be writing about on Skype’s 10th birthday…

My own immediate question, though, was more mundane:

How well will these Surface tablets work with Skype?

Given that Skype is now part of Microsoft, and that Skype CEO Tony Bates has said the company is focusing on Windows 8, you’d hope it would work well. Throughout all the media frenzy, though, I’ve seen very little on that… until I scrolled down the “About” page and found this bit (along with the image I’m including in this post):

Surface has not just one, but two cameras. Use the front LifeCam to chat with the people that you care about. The rear-facing LifeCam is angled to 22 degrees so you can flip out the Kickstand and record meetings and events hands-free. Stereo speakers and dual…

That’s a pretty amazing milestone, given that some of us can remember back to when the concurrent user count was in the upper 20s (early 2011) or even way back to the earlier days when it was down in the low millions (2007). This time of day has historically been one of the highest times, so I expect that we’ll see the count drop off for the remainder of the day and then hit this number again tomorrow around early afternoon US Eastern time.

Hudson Barton has an interesting trend chart showing the growth of Skype users over time:

The jump in the last quarter has been particularly dramatic – and probably has much to do with the expanded availability of Skype on smartphones and other devices.

Regardless of the reason, it’s a rather amazing milestone. Congrats to the folks at Skype!

P.S. Skype now…

Congrats to the folks at Skype as they cross over the milestone of having 35 million users online at the same time, just a week after crossing over the 34 million mark! That’s certain a great accomplishment and the recent growth is quite interesting.

It’s not entirely clear to me the source of the growth, but perhaps it is most attributable to the Windows Phone beta version of Skype they released last week. Any Skype users with Windows Phones (and given that they are part of Microsoft now there are probably a good number just within Microsoft) are now going to have a way to stay online more. Perhaps it’s also the new Skype-enabled TVs. Regardless, it’s great to learn of the growth.

Of course, on the Mac 5.5 version of Skype I can’t see the growth myself as there still seems to be no way to see the number of online users in the Mac client.

As I wrote about way back in November 2010, the Skype 2.8 client used to show the number of online users in the lower right corner of the client:

Now that number is nowhere to be seen. As I noted…

Is Skype now “boring” in 2011? That’s the question Phil Wolff raises over at the Skype Journal in his post “Skype is boring“.

Phil points out, quite correctly, that Skype is no longer the scrappy little startup intent on disrupting the entire global telecommunications industry.

They’ve done that.

Telecom has been disrupted.

As I wrote about back in August 2011, Skype has accomplished a great amount in its eight years of existence… completely destroying the expensive costs of international telephony, bringing video telephony to the masses, introducing people to wideband audio, demonstrating that you can have secure VoIP… and so much more…

But as we enter 2012, Phil offers a number of reasons why Skype is now “boring”. His main points are:

• Skype is a top dog, not an underdog.
• Skype is one-sixtieth of the Microsoft behemoth
• Skype is less unique
• Skype didn’t look innovative in 2011. Or 2010. Or 2009. Or 2008.
• Skype staff don’t talk to the public.
• Skype abandoned its revolutionary People’s Product identity,

(read Phil’s post for his full description)

And he notes the current status of Skype:

Skype should end 2011 with about a thousand employees, about a billion dollars in sales, a portfolio…

Brilliant Dilbert comic on December 8th:

Well said… in this era of so many different communications and collaboration tools, the need to fly somewhere for a “quick meeting” should hopefully be reduced. I fully understand the need for face-to-face meetings… and find them to be extremely effective when done well. But the kind of travel for a “quick meeting” that used to be routine really shouldn’t need to happen so much today.

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Yesterday I sat in such utter shock that I had to look out my window to see if, in fact, we were witnessing porcine aviation. My brain was having a hard time processing something I had just read online. I literally was speechless, which, if you know anything about me, is a very hard state for me to attain. 🙂

What created this cognitive dissonance?

You see…

Skype just announced the simultaneous release of new versions of Skype for BOTH Windows and Mac OS X.

Even more, the two versions almost have feature parity.

Yes, indeed, you can now get the Skype 5.7 beta for Windows and the Skype 5.4 beta for Mac OS X, both of which introduce a “Facebook video calling” feature, and both of which bring the two releases closer to “feature parity”.

Why is this a big deal?

If you have been reading this site for any length of time, you have probably seen some of these posts:

• December 2008 – Skype launches 4.0 Beta 3 … still only on Windows… and still a fragmented product strategy..
  
  
• June 2009 – Skype launches version 4.1……