Apr 9, 2010
Startling Fact of the Day: Skype Edition
Steve Jobs announced yesterday that iPhone OS 4.0 would support multi-tasking. Yeah, I know. It’s long overdue.
He gave some examples. Pandora — the killer app for multi-tasking. And Skype. And in talking about Skype on the iPhone, Jobs said:
Skype already connects more than 1 in every 9 international phone calls.
Consume Market Share
Maybe that’s old news. Still, that’s a pretty astounding statistic to me. Think of the number of international calls. Now, how many of those are placed by multi-national companies to offices and/or customers abroad? 75%? 85%? Let’s assume that those customers aren’t that price sensitive. The cost of an international call is a rounding error in their operations budgets.
If we’re even close on that, it means that Skype has somewhere between 33% and 66% of the consumer international call market.
Why Multi-Tasking Matters
The reason multi-tasking is so valuable for Skype on the iPhone is that, it enables you to keep Skype running in the background, able to receive calls whenever they come in, from anywhere direct to your Skype account. That removes the key limitation of Skype as a phone solution: being bound to your computer to take calls to your Skype account.
I’m willing to bet that the ability to keep Skype running in the background on the iPhone will make Skype that much more attractive, not just within the consumer market, but the business market as well. It’s just a hunch, but I’m willing to bet that the average iPhone user is more likely to place international calls than the average mobile phone owner.
And for Skype dedicated international phone callers, it’s likely to provide just the justification they need to get that iPhone they’ve been wanting.
Another Announcement
That fact certainly puts the announcement yesterday that Google is testing Google Voice for Desktop.
Even with Skype’s head start in consumer mind-share, I’m not willing to bet against Google here. While they haven’t shown tremendous success in unseating network-effects-harvesting “web 2.0″ start-ups and social networks, VOIP is an area where their unparalleled access to capital, engineering talent, and network infrastructure could prove decisive.
Put it this way: Would you want to try to develop the feature set that Google Voice already has—visual voice mail, automatic transcription, translation, dedicated free telephone number, sophisticated call forwarding, intelligent call parsing, etc.—on Skype’s budget? What about the unannounced features Google Voice has in the pipeline?