The Big Skype Evil

I feel obliged to post about the way Skype is going:

A couple of months ago Skype released a new Beta version of their Mac application that allows you to access their platform.

'Great' I thought.

Being a software optimist I was envisaging a great refresh with some nice User Interface (UI) tweaks and maybe some updated functionality, so I downloaded the Beta and eagerly went to work on it.

Disappointed is probably the right emotion to use, but I kept at it for a good few days until it interrupted with workflow. I'm a very heavy Skype user because I work in a different country to my office so try to make it as easy as possible to get hold of me. Skype makes this fantastic; I have a London number that UK based people can ring which calls ether my computer here in Spain, my home landline, my British cell phone or redirects to my Spanish cell phone. This means I pay for any call that comes into anything but my computer.

Fantastic. I don't mind paying for a service.

Except when the company gets greedy and wants to slyly add some advertising revenue in there by making a new version of their closed, proprietary client.

Skype, that's not nice.

I posted this on their Blog, under a mountain of comments about the huge UI.

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The whole massive UI debacle didn't make sense to me until I read this:

http://blogs.skype.com/en/2011/03/advertising.html

I am another 'tried 5.0 (really really hard) and went back to 2.8 within 2 days' person.

So I pay for a Skype number, I pay for skype-to-go, I pay a monthly subscription for landlines AND I pay to call cell phones.

Now I get this massive UI thrown at me and the prospect of advertising thrown down my throat.

After I press the 'Post Comment' button I'm looking for alternatives; it's likely I'll hang around because I believe that Skype, at it's core, is a good service but there is a strong wiff of greed in the air.

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There is also a fantastic note about them being likely to pull support for old versions of the app, so it could be the case where you have to have a massive app with ads flashing in your face, even if you did save the old version.

Add to the pile, please and let them know we're not happy.