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From my experience the same (often random) reason that makes a company succeeds, then becomes their DNA, and finally can make them fail. I saw this happen with

From my experience the same (often random) reason that makes a company succeeds, then becomes their DNA, and finally can make them fail. I saw this happen with Skype where I worked a couple of years. The company succeeded because of P2P: we grew with little infrastructure to reach 200M+ people. P2P became our DNA, rooted deep within (almost) every core component. Then came the new wave of mobile messaging apps. We reacted... with a P2P messaging solution. It was obvious this wasn't working - you sent a message to someone from Skype for iPhone, and they got it... sometime. We knew to have a chance against Whatsapp and other messaging apps we needed server based messaging, so we built it. It took 3 years. Yes, it took this long to get rid of the P2P code from just the messaging components from the 20+ Skype products - we had 1,000+ engineers and 50+ internal teams by the end which significantly slowed things down. When we were done and popped the champagne - no one really cared. And yes, the source code is still full of P2P references and workarounds to this date.

im2w1l 11y ago
Why was it hard to deliver messages to iphone using p2p? I mean I guess they couldn't open ports and listen for messages, but that should have been true for plenty of NATed systems too right?
- joshyeager 11y ago
  We used Skype IM for a long time (inertia). It wasn't just the iPhone. Skype message delivery was erratic on all platforms. It got better, but even now there are occasional delivery delays when I chat with someone who hasn't switched over (we use Slack now).
  - gregdoesit 11y ago
    Yes, there are still traces of the p2p code. Most of messaging has been migrated to server based back ends, but there are still some hybrid solutions in place. Funny thing the company DNA, P2P is still haunting Skype.
    - johansch 11y ago
      The windows client still has funny bugs like: 1. You receive a message from someone. (wait a few hours) 2. You open this tab/read the message 3. The number of unread messages counter doesn't update.
      - bananaboy 11y ago
        That's been happening to me a lot lately. I've noticed that I have to right-click the conversation and click "Mark as read". Very annoying.
      - kuschku 11y ago
        At least the windows client does something. The linux client... well, for the longest time you could be lucky if it would even work. After years of not updating the bundled libraries, they stopped interfacing well with the ones in the system. And then there was an update, which changed nothing, except for introducing ads on linux and disabling video chat for most cases. The issue of skype might not be P2P, it sounds more like it was a lack of ability to provide a stable product of any kind. The Android app was also the worst app I had seen for many years. Who the hell seriously builds their own UI toolkit, and then makes it work worse than the one bundled with the OS?
        ricksplat 11y ago
        I have to disagree .. I used the Linux client extensively between 2008 and 2013 and it was just fine. There was an issue that caused it to hang and use 100% of it's assigned CPU from time to time but I was able to write a little watchdog script for that (: Could be it fell apart more recently than that but I think that could have been said of Skype in general ...
- rgbrgb 11y ago
  Guessing it was because both phones need to have the app open at the same time. Skype's main p2p tech was built for the real-time synchronous chat use-case (like AIM), as opposed to the chat-log in the cloud use-case (like Slack).
  - gregdoesit 11y ago
    Exactly. In hindsight we should have just built a separate messaging layer with a server backend like everyone else was doing. However Skype had no history of running servers. Just keeping the login servers up and running (a handful of them) was enough of a challenge. Plus when the company's success and revenue was driven by the P2P team and they said the same layer will work for messages... there was no one strong enough to argue. And when it was obvious that Skype messaging was sub par, the company just went in denial. "We aren't really competing with Whatsapp, because they don't do video" got us another year or two of not doing too much about the root cause. It was after the Microsoft aquisition when some MS architects told the engineers upfront that p2p and realtime messaging - forget about it.
    - JoBrad 11y ago
      I'm not sure if this story has been told this plainly elsewhere, but it probably should. I know plenty of people who got very paranoid of Skype after MS bought them.
    - kpil 11y 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?
      - gregdoesit 11y ago
        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.
- gregdoesit 11y ago
  The problem was the avalibity when the sender was offline. You send a message from your iPhone to your friend who has an Android. Your friend doesn't have reception, and after sending the message you kill Skype b/c of the battery drain (otherwise it is being part of the p2p network). Your friend now gets reception and will get your message... between a minute and a couple of hours. Most likely when you turn your phone back on, as the p2p network was not designed to store and propagate offline messages. Meanwhile someone at Whatsapp built a key value pair on a server and if you had reception, you got the messages immediately and reliably. Oh, yeah, because the read and unread message states in Skype also propagated via the p2p network and also got took a while to arrive...
  - 3pt14159 11y ago
    I'm really surprised that Skype didn't just build a separate system for mobile. It seems even a simple evaluation of the facts (needing hundreds of engineers to alter an already stable product) pushes things more to the server side than the P2P side.
    - 21p 11y ago
      hindsight is 20/20. It would be quite easy for a team of developers and product managers to get together to discuss "how we take what we have and extend it to cover the new use case" rather than "what is the best approach for the new use case".
      - firebones 11y ago
        But even before reuse, the "DNA" point can't be overlooked, though. Success breeds a belief that "our differentiators" need to be considered and baked into subsequent products. More often than not, those constraints lead to situations where you're fitting a square peg into a round hole, as with Skype and P2P messaging. What saves some companies from this is a core DNA that can be interpreted in a very liberal and malleable fashion. For instance, Amazon is about distribution--be it products, bits, computing power. Facebook is about social connection (not P2P or a particular narrowing of tech). Of course, maybe that's just survivorship bias...no one keeps a good directory of the graveyard of corporate DNA that was as similarly broad. Now whether that is a function of articulating flexible DNA, or the flexibility of the decision makers...I don't know. Either way, fixed mindsets close down adaptivity to new opportunities.
- pbreit 11y ago
  Your is a perfect example of the original posting and the comment you are replying to. People have such a hard time acknowledging what they don't know.
johansch 11y ago
In hindsight it was a really bizarre decision to deliver tiny time critical messages via p2p in the first place. I guess because it "made sense" because you had no scalable server infrastructure in the early years, and because the main thing was voice anyway...
serguzest 11y ago
We used to have MSN messenger, microsoft killed it in favor of skype. Skype has been always awful for instant messaging. I don't remember I have ever used a skype client without some annoying bug. Beside skype has terrible ui on Windows, current version has a bug causes wrong message ordering. On android, I have experienced all those message delivery/notification bugs and it works slow. I don't know how the experience is like in IOS and MacOs. Maybe I should all switch to Apple to have the best experience from a microsoft product?
- AlphaSite 11y ago
  Honestly, the Mac client had always been the best client for Skype and the Windows desktop by far and away the worst but as of Kate's bugs are creeping into both.
  - distances 11y ago
    That's interesting. In our company the Mac users were always complaining about the app quality, while Windows users seemed to be rather happy, until all the ads came in at least. No-one here uses Skype any more though. It's all Flowdock for messaging and Hangouts for conferencing.
    - AlphaSite 11y ago
      The Mac clients not great but I really hate the Windows one and it feels inferior in just about every way.
- makomk 11y ago
  I believe Skype actually uses the former MSN Messenger servers and protocol behind the scenes for instant messaging now. Microsoft literally ripped Skype's IM support out and replaced it with MSN's.
- lmm 11y ago
  Skype used to be great (this predates the MS switchover). They were the first major messaging network to get the multi-client use case right (i.e. sign in from your home desktop, your work desktop, and your phone at the same time - under skype this will just work). Sadly the increasingly forced updates always made the UI/UX worse, the phone client was a resource hog, and they weren't quick enough with a user-friendly web client. Meanwhile Slack showed us all how it's done. I'm genuinely trying to get my friends to switch to AIM - as far as I can tell that's the free option that comes closest to getting it right.
ktamura 11y ago
Going off the tangent a bit but: did the original article actually talk about WhatsApp in the context of "going up/going down the stack"? Or, did it just appear in one of the subtitles?
mistermann 11y ago
Not to mention, in the process they more or less broke the core functionality of Skype: video and audio conferencing. Skype is so bad it's difficult to believe it's not some sort of a practical joke.
- mseebach 11y ago
  How do you mean? I've used Skype video calling at least a few times a week for the past ~5 years, and it's generally worked very well? Definitely well enough that it's never occurred to me to shop around. (Skype IM is a joke, I agree)
  - gizzlon 11y ago
    I'm not GP, but the few handful of times I've Skyped to other countries the experience has varied from kind-of-ok to horrible. Maybe it's a location thing? I'm in Scandinavia..
    - m1sta_ 11y ago
      I do Australia/UK regularly without problem. It seems to be very dependant on the participants network connections, not surprisingly. It doesn't seem to recover from temporary network issues fast enough.
  - mistermann 11y ago
    The UI is an abomination, I have great difficulty doing anything. But as far video conferencing, in my experience the video and audio is grainy and brutal, you can call the very same person using Facetime and it is crystal clear. And when there is a temporary drop in bandwidth (I assume that is the cause), rather than dropping the high-bandwidth video resolution slightly, it seems to cut the low-bandwidth audio completely.
- avn2109 11y ago
  >> "...Skype is so bad..." Dude you should try Hipchat video conferencing, it makes Skype look like the future.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
throwaway161803 11y ago
"Having got on well by adopting a certain line of conduct, it is impossible to persuade men that they can get on well by acting otherwise. It thus comes about that a man's fortune changes, when his circumstances change but he does not." Niccolò Machiavelli

im2w1l 11y ago

Why was it hard to deliver messages to iphone using p2p? I mean I guess they couldn't open ports and listen for messages, but that should have been true for plenty of NATed systems too right?

joshyeager 11y ago
We used Skype IM for a long time (inertia). It wasn't just the iPhone. Skype message delivery was erratic on all platforms. It got better, but even now there are occasional delivery delays when I chat with someone who hasn't switched over (we use Slack now).
- gregdoesit 11y ago
  Yes, there are still traces of the p2p code. Most of messaging has been migrated to server based back ends, but there are still some hybrid solutions in place. Funny thing the company DNA, P2P is still haunting Skype.
  - johansch 11y ago
    The windows client still has funny bugs like: 1. You receive a message from someone. (wait a few hours) 2. You open this tab/read the message 3. The number of unread messages counter doesn't update.
    - bananaboy 11y ago
      That's been happening to me a lot lately. I've noticed that I have to right-click the conversation and click "Mark as read". Very annoying.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      At least the windows client does something. The linux client... well, for the longest time you could be lucky if it would even work. After years of not updating the bundled libraries, they stopped interfacing well with the ones in the system. And then there was an update, which changed nothing, except for introducing ads on linux and disabling video chat for most cases. The issue of skype might not be P2P, it sounds more like it was a lack of ability to provide a stable product of any kind. The Android app was also the worst app I had seen for many years. Who the hell seriously builds their own UI toolkit, and then makes it work worse than the one bundled with the OS?
      - ricksplat 11y ago
        I have to disagree .. I used the Linux client extensively between 2008 and 2013 and it was just fine. There was an issue that caused it to hang and use 100% of it's assigned CPU from time to time but I was able to write a little watchdog script for that (: Could be it fell apart more recently than that but I think that could have been said of Skype in general ...
rgbrgb 11y ago
Guessing it was because both phones need to have the app open at the same time. Skype's main p2p tech was built for the real-time synchronous chat use-case (like AIM), as opposed to the chat-log in the cloud use-case (like Slack).
- gregdoesit 11y ago
  Exactly. In hindsight we should have just built a separate messaging layer with a server backend like everyone else was doing. However Skype had no history of running servers. Just keeping the login servers up and running (a handful of them) was enough of a challenge. Plus when the company's success and revenue was driven by the P2P team and they said the same layer will work for messages... there was no one strong enough to argue. And when it was obvious that Skype messaging was sub par, the company just went in denial. "We aren't really competing with Whatsapp, because they don't do video" got us another year or two of not doing too much about the root cause. It was after the Microsoft aquisition when some MS architects told the engineers upfront that p2p and realtime messaging - forget about it.
  - JoBrad 11y ago
    I'm not sure if this story has been told this plainly elsewhere, but it probably should. I know plenty of people who got very paranoid of Skype after MS bought them.
  - kpil 11y 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?
    - gregdoesit 11y ago
      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.
gregdoesit 11y ago
The problem was the avalibity when the sender was offline. You send a message from your iPhone to your friend who has an Android. Your friend doesn't have reception, and after sending the message you kill Skype b/c of the battery drain (otherwise it is being part of the p2p network). Your friend now gets reception and will get your message... between a minute and a couple of hours. Most likely when you turn your phone back on, as the p2p network was not designed to store and propagate offline messages. Meanwhile someone at Whatsapp built a key value pair on a server and if you had reception, you got the messages immediately and reliably. Oh, yeah, because the read and unread message states in Skype also propagated via the p2p network and also got took a while to arrive...
- 3pt14159 11y ago
  I'm really surprised that Skype didn't just build a separate system for mobile. It seems even a simple evaluation of the facts (needing hundreds of engineers to alter an already stable product) pushes things more to the server side than the P2P side.
  - 21p 11y ago
    hindsight is 20/20. It would be quite easy for a team of developers and product managers to get together to discuss "how we take what we have and extend it to cover the new use case" rather than "what is the best approach for the new use case".
    - firebones 11y ago
      But even before reuse, the "DNA" point can't be overlooked, though. Success breeds a belief that "our differentiators" need to be considered and baked into subsequent products. More often than not, those constraints lead to situations where you're fitting a square peg into a round hole, as with Skype and P2P messaging. What saves some companies from this is a core DNA that can be interpreted in a very liberal and malleable fashion. For instance, Amazon is about distribution--be it products, bits, computing power. Facebook is about social connection (not P2P or a particular narrowing of tech). Of course, maybe that's just survivorship bias...no one keeps a good directory of the graveyard of corporate DNA that was as similarly broad. Now whether that is a function of articulating flexible DNA, or the flexibility of the decision makers...I don't know. Either way, fixed mindsets close down adaptivity to new opportunities.
pbreit 11y ago
Your is a perfect example of the original posting and the comment you are replying to. People have such a hard time acknowledging what they don't know.

johansch 11y ago

In hindsight it was a really bizarre decision to deliver tiny time critical messages via p2p in the first place. I guess because it "made sense" because you had no scalable server infrastructure in the early years, and because the main thing was voice anyway...

serguzest 11y ago

We used to have MSN messenger, microsoft killed it in favor of skype. Skype has been always awful for instant messaging. I don't remember I have ever used a skype client without some annoying bug. Beside skype has terrible ui on Windows, current version has a bug causes wrong message ordering. On android, I have experienced all those message delivery/notification bugs and it works slow. I don't know how the experience is like in IOS and MacOs. Maybe I should all switch to Apple to have the best experience from a microsoft product?

AlphaSite 11y ago
Honestly, the Mac client had always been the best client for Skype and the Windows desktop by far and away the worst but as of Kate's bugs are creeping into both.
- distances 11y ago
  That's interesting. In our company the Mac users were always complaining about the app quality, while Windows users seemed to be rather happy, until all the ads came in at least. No-one here uses Skype any more though. It's all Flowdock for messaging and Hangouts for conferencing.
  - AlphaSite 11y ago
    The Mac clients not great but I really hate the Windows one and it feels inferior in just about every way.
makomk 11y ago
I believe Skype actually uses the former MSN Messenger servers and protocol behind the scenes for instant messaging now. Microsoft literally ripped Skype's IM support out and replaced it with MSN's.
lmm 11y ago
Skype used to be great (this predates the MS switchover). They were the first major messaging network to get the multi-client use case right (i.e. sign in from your home desktop, your work desktop, and your phone at the same time - under skype this will just work). Sadly the increasingly forced updates always made the UI/UX worse, the phone client was a resource hog, and they weren't quick enough with a user-friendly web client. Meanwhile Slack showed us all how it's done. I'm genuinely trying to get my friends to switch to AIM - as far as I can tell that's the free option that comes closest to getting it right.

ktamura 11y ago

Going off the tangent a bit but: did the original article actually talk about WhatsApp in the context of "going up/going down the stack"? Or, did it just appear in one of the subtitles?

mistermann 11y ago

Not to mention, in the process they more or less broke the core functionality of Skype: video and audio conferencing. Skype is so bad it's difficult to believe it's not some sort of a practical joke.

mseebach 11y ago
How do you mean? I've used Skype video calling at least a few times a week for the past ~5 years, and it's generally worked very well? Definitely well enough that it's never occurred to me to shop around. (Skype IM is a joke, I agree)
- gizzlon 11y ago
  I'm not GP, but the few handful of times I've Skyped to other countries the experience has varied from kind-of-ok to horrible. Maybe it's a location thing? I'm in Scandinavia..
  - m1sta_ 11y ago
    I do Australia/UK regularly without problem. It seems to be very dependant on the participants network connections, not surprisingly. It doesn't seem to recover from temporary network issues fast enough.
- mistermann 11y ago
  The UI is an abomination, I have great difficulty doing anything. But as far video conferencing, in my experience the video and audio is grainy and brutal, you can call the very same person using Facetime and it is crystal clear. And when there is a temporary drop in bandwidth (I assume that is the cause), rather than dropping the high-bandwidth video resolution slightly, it seems to cut the low-bandwidth audio completely.
avn2109 11y ago
>> "...Skype is so bad..." Dude you should try Hipchat video conferencing, it makes Skype look like the future.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

throwaway161803 11y ago

"Having got on well by adopting a certain line of conduct, it is impossible to persuade men that they can get on well by acting otherwise. It thus comes about that a man's fortune changes, when his circumstances change but he does not." Niccolò Machiavelli