Connecting the world

Unravelling the Skype saga

Retirement is a strange thing. Sometimes there’s a big party, a celebration of a working life and the chance to remember major contributions and how much someone has influenced the lives of others. Sometimes it’s just a quiet slipping away, a gentle closing of the door behind you and a drifting off into other worlds.

Microsoft seems to have arranged a version of the latter to mark the fading away of an innovation which began life in the backrooms of a couple of programmers from the Baltic region and ended up changing the world. You may not even have noticed but last month saw the formal retirement of Skype, once such a dominant force in communications that we would happily talk about ‘skyping’ someone but which now has been overtaken by a whole new generation of platforms and networks.

So before the memory fades completely it might be worth reflecting on the Skype story and some lessons it might offer us about innovation. Starting with the fact that, as T.S. Eliot memorably put it, ‘our beginnings never know their ends…’. Because Skype began a long way from the world of communications….

Once upon a time there was music. Lots of it, and a world hungry for it. In fact the music part has been around a very long time, at least as far back as 40,000 years when archaeologists suggest the first primitive instruments were in use. Even the Gods got involved; Homer suggests that Hermes invented the lyre by stretching animal sinews across a tortoiseshell and letting the wind work its magic. We’ve always loved to listen to music; the trouble is that it’s hard to recreate the experience if we’re unlucky enough to miss the original performance.

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