Aswath Weblog

Cup is Half Empty

An updated statistics is now available from Skype (ignore the linear growth; assume no intermediate data has been plotted) and the usual round of wow is going around. Even Om is welling up and it is safe to predict that his heart will be fluttering with the release of the next round of statistics.

First a summary of the statistics that we are told so far:
Registered number of users: 35M to 40M
Concurrent users online at any time: 2M to 3M
Number of Skype minutes in a month day: 40M to 50M minutes

A decidedly trouble maker’s interpretation of these numbers:

1. Less than 10% of users are online at any given time, thereby reducing the “network effect” tremendously. But wait. This is good, because this means users need voice mail, a subscription service.
2. So a user is generating an average of less than 2 minutes per month day. Alternatively, most of the users are using Skype for text chat (because they are searching for the headset, generalizing from personal experience).

Phil is very conservative in his predictions. A Skypist (as opposed to a Skype user, known as Skyper) should hope to see at least 80% users online at any given time. Of course, the number of minutes served must be aleph-0, not any finite number (since google is spoken for).