loves2splooge said:
Plus it's hard to build something from the ground up. There are other Voice-over-IP competitors than Skype on the market. But since Skype has the largest Voice over IP user base, it's seen as the safe bet. That's why I go with Skype. If I go with some other smaller, cheaper competitor and then I find that their service is inferior (since I use Skype to call landlines and mobiles, which costs money, I wouldn't want to waste buying credit on a service that sucks), that's going to leave a bad taste in my mouth. It's similar to how people sign up for a cheap cell service and then find out that the coverage and/or reception sucks balls. You get what you pay for. That's not always true but a lot of the time it is. There's a reason why here in Canada Rogers/Bell/Telus are so expensive compared to say Wind/Mobilicity. Maintaining a national cell network in a huge country like Canada doesn't come cheap (and plus the CRTC are nazis when it comes to foreign investment. But that's a rant for another topic). And I'm willing to bet that Skype's infrastructure isn't exactly cheap to maintain either. It costs lots of money to connect all those calls to landlines and mobiles worldwide and to buy out all those telephone numbers across multiple countries so that they can offer that Online Number service (sadly isn't available in Canada yet). Microsoft has the resources to invest in this infrastructure but it takes time to build up a user base obviously. |
Good post. Yeah I would not know what the startup costs would be for a service like Skype. And I know better than to think I am smarter than Microsoft execs and that something can be done cheaper/better if done inhouse.
