Skype is the world’s biggest international Voice over IP provider, used by millions daily as a way to keep connected with family & friends. This wonderfully free tool has made consumer video calling as common as sending a text, and has opened up a world of face-to-face interaction that would never have been possible directly from your front room merely 10 years ago.
But it’s also opened up a can of worms. Skype has posed one of the biggest challenges for the video conferencing industry over the past 5 years, due to it’s closed architecture & “island” approach towards interoperability. It uses it’s own media protocols that does not follow industry standards – or in layman’s terms, “we’re doing it our own way. Choose our way or the highway”. And with the purchase of Skype by Microsoft back in 2011, we’re not too surprised it hasn’t opened up. In fact, there’s a great deal of money to be made in Lync (Skype for Business) if it’s the only professional solution the 200 million or so Skype users can talk with.
