Some fascinating comments on Skype from Chris Sacca, Google's head of special operations, who told the Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford conference this week that Skype is "still the next big thing".
This is all particularly interesting in light of rumours that Google might be looking to buy Skype from eBay. All extremely speculative, but it's worth reading the delightful "no comment" response that Om Malik received from eBay. Always nice when the PR department has a sense of humour.
Anyway, Chris Sacca questioned why the company's key talent had left, and said it is still a powerful, ubiquitous communications platform that has "so much potential".
"Skype is still is the next big thing. It hasn't been given a chance.
"I've spent time with Niklas [Zennstrom] and Janus [Friis], met the key engineers and been to Tallin in Estonia. Those guys have a lot of vision and I don't know what demotivated them because there is so much potential in that platform. I'm amazed.
"It's ubiquitous, it has crossed continents, and though not open it is standardised enough - they have built APIs so that it can be built into in devices.
"It is fascinating that not more has been done, and I'm looking forward to something cool being done with it."
Sacca said he "didn't have any inside information" on Skype, but that all the people that drove the business have left.
"As an outsider, I saw all the people who really drove that thing leave, so all the people who had the vision and knew the potential of what a powerful, ubiquitous platform that could be for communications - they all left to pursue other stuff. I don't know what happened with these people that they weren't incentivised to stay around and work on that vision."
He talked about how Google works with staff from companies that are bought, and said that the investment is often more about the team than the product.
"One of the things the people who run Google were smart enough to do is buy YouTube and leave it alone. There is so much great entrepreneurial talent in that company, we could have been in great position to screw it up. We didn't do so well with our own video product and so the odds were against us. But we were in a position to say these guys are great - let's give them some resources and send them some talent, and let them kick some ass."
So we're still digging, but it's very interesting to read the responses to the idea; almost everyone seems to think the idea has legs, not least this eBay shareholder. Note this comment from GigaOm though, which points out a detail from eBay's ownership of Skype that might dictate that any sale would be after March 31 next year.
So the shareholders think it's a great idea, Chris Sacca thinks it's the next big thing... c'mon guys. Get it on! And then we can all have cheap free international mobile calls.
Isn't that the bottom line?
Technorati Tags: eBay, Google, Skype
