Developer: "badly managed"

Comment by an anonymous independent Skype Developer Program member since 2005, enthusiastic about Skype Extras since it was announced.

This again represents a lack of good management at Skype.

Skype as part of eBay could have worked really well if there were the people with a vision and the will to see through that vision. For example the "Skype alert" facility which passed eBay messages to Skype as a chat message was great. Until the feature was dropped in Skype version 4!

A company such as Skype is only as strong as the people around it. This means the end-users and, very importantly, the developer ecosystem. Microsoft has always been good at getting developers "into bed" with them.

Skype has shown that it regards the developer community as not being of interest to them, because it believes that the Skype Extras program has not attracted much interest. The reason for that is that it was badly managed: new entries and updates to Skype Extras took too long to appear, there was no clear and easy way to monetize an Extra once it was there and overall one gets the feeling that Skype didn't really "care" about this project.

tags: skype, devrels, extras

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