Skype CEO Josh Silverman -- Thoughts After the First Four Weeks.
Skype internal blogger Villu Arak today published an interview with Skype's new CEO, Josh Silverman. Josh has had four weeks, spent largely with the developer team in Tallinn, to dig into Skype's activities and to start to triage a picture of where Skype should be heading. Read Villu's complete interview but a few key statements:
Initial observations:
Where I can perhaps add value is to help us focus us on the "Vital Few" - the (very) few things we're going to commit to delivering with excellence; as opposed to the "Worthless Many" - the long list of very good ideas which, if we tried to tackle them all, would bring us to our knees. The hard part about prioritization isn't saying "no" to bad ideas, that's easy. It's saying "no" to the good ones in order to deliver on the truly essential and/or breakthrough projects that really drives focus through an organization.
Core interest of the Skype community at heart:
Besides keeping communication within the Skype cloud free, there are two things we need to deliver very well: incredible ease of use and world-class sound and video. Everything else wins us bonus points.
Skype's priorities in 2008 and beyond:
....this year we'll make video - including multiparty video - more prominent and, er, easier to use. But more generally, I talk about end-to-end ease of use. It goes far beyond making the green call button easier to find. We're looking at every aspect, every stage of the user journey. From when you download the client and make your first call, all the way through the range of products we have, from the desktop to mobile. We're going to focus on where the biggest pain-points are along that journey, in order to make the whole experience seamless and delightfully easy.
Existing things you'd like to fix:
At the top of my "now" agenda is this: radical ease of use. Skype still confuses some people, so we're digging even deeper to achieve step function change.
On developer partners:
Philosophically speaking, I do think we need to continue building a robust ecosystem and supporting the developer community as best we can. I'm taking a little time to understand where we are and what the next steps should be. Soon, I'll share more thoughts on this on the Skype Developer Zone blog.
And on the prospect of eBay selling Skype:
Skype is a strong, profitable business with 61% year-on-year revenue growth and 309 million registered users, with 33 million added in Q1 2008. eBay has just made a huge investment in Skype by removing the earn-out. We have new management in place, and with the earnout out of the way, we measure ourselves by our ability to delight our users. [SJ link added] That's our focus. That's our test.
We understand that Josh will make himself available for external interviews within the next few weeks, once he has had time to complete his review of Skype's entire business. There are lots of challenges in Josh's statements and lots of promise. As he stated at the end of one response: "But let me get through the first hundred days and let's take stock of our progress in the summer."
Tags: Skype, Josh Silverman, Villu Arak, Skype Blog, Skype video, Skype audio, Skype Developer Program
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Comments
Interesting, and telling, that the list of top priorities doesn't include a single word about Customer Support.
Posted by: J.A. Watson | April 21, 2008 12:22 PM
I have just read the interview with Josh Silverman the new Skype CEO and what a sham interview it was. Talk about bias, bias is not the word.
Tell me how can you get the answers to questions that MUST and NEED to be answered when it is so stage managed. What is the matter with you Josh are you to frightened to come out and face the REAL world and the REAL problems that are happening at Skype this very moment.
This interview cannot be call a proper interview when the person asking the questions is none other than Skype's very own publicity department therefore they are not going to ask him the most IMPORTANT things like when are we going to get a customer service that works or HQ Video that works for everybody no matter what platform or web camera they use, if companies like ooVoo and SightSpeed can di it why can't Skype do it, because I think they have got themselves into such a deep deep hole with this there is not a ladder long enough to reach down to them to pull them out.
Josh we don't want bells and whistles at the moment we want a system and Customer Service that works but at the moment everything is going backwards not forwards. From the comments in your staged interview it would seem you are being miss guided and only told the thinks that people what you to know, like we are developing Skype to integrated with this gismo or that gismo etc.
Yes I know we have to have development and I am all for it but, this development must be done on a stable working platform which at the moment Skype does not have. Josh it would seem that you either do not listen to what your customers say or if you do you choose the pretend to be deaf because is was suggested here what need to be done first and not a thing has been put right.
Posted by: a1gjv | May 3, 2008 10:47 AM