A contrarian take on Skype for Windows 4.1

Dan York, best practices chair of the VoIP Security Alliance and an admitted Skype advocate, is not impressed with the VoIP giant's product strategy, according to a recent blog post he wrote regarding Skype's 4.1 for Windows announcement last week. He said the inability for his Mac Skype client to use updated features on another operating system, such as Windows or Linux, makes it hard to get all users enthused about new updates to Skype's software.

"Don't get me wrong - I'm a huge Skype fan," York wrote. "It's open for me all the time and I have something like 40+ group chats (IM) open at any time for various projects and teams. But Skype's continued belief in a fragmented, fractured, siloed platform-specific product strategy is still a path of monumental stupidity, in my opinion."

York expressed his desire for the next full release of Skype to enable feature interoperability amongst operating systems and to also coordinate the release across the multiple OSs on which Skype operates. He's been talking about the lack of feature interoperability for some time, and you can take a look at an earlier article on York's position here. 

UPDATE: Chaim Haas, Skype spokesman, contacted FierceVoIP with objections to an inference in previous versions of this story that Skype is not interoperable across operating systems. Haas said: "What Dan did, in fact, write about is a subject that Skype's product teams have discussed with him at length over the last 2½ years - and that is feature equality: that every Skype release, regardless of OS, should have the same features and that they should be available to all users at the same time. This is very different than interoperability, which connotes something totally different." FierceVoIP regrets any confusion from the previous use of "interoperable" and "interoperability," without context that this was in reference to cross-platform feature updates alone, and not the core video and voice services Skype offers.

For more:
- see the full article here on Dan's Disruptive Telephony blog 

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