Economist har en bra artikel om Niklas Zennström och Skype.
Zennström vet hur man skriver bramjukvaruprodukter, något som få idag vet:
Since its launch last August, the Skype software has been downloaded over 14m times, and now has over 6m regular users—and all without any advertising. That was another lesson learned from KaZaA, says Mr Zennstrom: “If you want to spread software to a large group of people, it must be simple, not need configuration, and give you instant gratification.”
Han förstår också hur man revolutionerar telekombranschen:
But Mr Zennstrom thinks that merely linking traditional and internet-based phone systems is an inelegant halfway house. He is more radical, believing that all calls will migrate to the internet and be provided via software alone, with no need for any dedicated infrastructure. Telephony will be another free internet service, like e-mail and web browsing are today. (Skype plans to make money by charging for extras such as voice-mail, call waiting, multiple lines and calls to the few die-hards who stick with pre-internet phones.) If he is right, the traditional fixed-line voice business will shrivel and die, and telecoms incumbents will be reduced to selling broadband access, and little else.
Mr Zennstrom has competed with telecoms giants before, having worked at Tele2, then a small Swedish operator, during the 1990s. He came to the conclusion that only a radically new approach to telephony would ever be able to challenge the incumbents, whose ownership of national telephone networks gives them a huge advantage over their competitors. Skype is the result. So how can the incumbents respond? Some are rushing to launch their own internet-telephony services, but most are trapped in the monopolist mindset. Mr Zennstrom recalls their attempts in the early 1990s to establish fee-based proprietary e-mail services, in effect clinging to the old idea of the telegram. Such services were wiped out by internet-based e-mail, which was free. The same, he believes, will now happen to telephony.
Artikeln nämner också ett viktigt Internetprotokoll som kan komma att bli viktigt för internettelefoni: Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)
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