Comment by kpil
10 years ago
I think the denial is the important lession here.
Plenty of people knew it didn't fly, and it couldn't have been that hard to fix it if you really wanted to do it, if you were prepared to drop p2p. But still it was a hard descision to make.
Why do you think it's like that?
I think it was denial that messaging itself would be more inportant then video calling.
Skype got massive because of video (and audio) calls. That was our main differentiator, and what helped us grow. P2P really excelled there.
Messaging was built as almost an afterthought and supporting feature, piggybacking on whatever infrastructure we already had in place.
And of course it didn't help that there was no one person or team in charge of the user experience who would call out that we have far inferior messaging experience then... any of our competitors, really.
Even when we did - and aquired GroupMe to do something about it - we then still had the false sense of security and not needing to hurry, because user numbers were still growing upwards. And when they slowed down, it was too late.