Church of the Customer Blog
« Changing the world, again | Main | So what's TiVo's problem? »
February 11, 2004
Changing the world, again
The duo that brought the world Kazaa (and picked up where Napster failed) has used strong word-of-mouse networks to build their new monster: Skype, a PC-based telephone system.
There's nothing new about PC-to-PC telephony, but Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom know a few things about viral strategies and upsetting industries.
As this Fortune article discovered:
[Skype's] P2P underpinnings mean that Skype can grow without adding much, if any, infrastructure. It costs Vonage -- the top provider of paid Internet telephony, with 97,000 users -- almost $400 to add a new customer. It costs Skype $0.001. Not only has Skype been downloaded more than 6 million times in six months, it is regularly used in more than 170 countries -- and it has spread by word of mouth alone.
In the customer evangelism model, Skype is doing several things very well:
1. It has generated significant buzz within influential networks.
2. It's free, which is the ultimate bite-size chunk. (Eventually, Skype will create revenue by charging for add-on services such as voicemail.)
3. If ever there was a cause for rallying angry, continually dissatisfied customers, it is destroying and rebuilding the telecommunications industrial complex. Skype appears as a very large bulldozer.
Other blogs that reference Changing the world, again:
» Skype is a large bulldozer for destroying and rebuilding the telecoms industrial complex !?! from North American Bandwidth News
[Read More]
