Yes, I’m late to the party on this one, but we just tried out Skype and it’s everything that it claims to be: free internet telephony that just works.
My brother-in-law, whom I just mentioned and my mother-in-law have been using Skype since I told them about it a few months ago. They’ve said that it’s great.
But the funny thing is, even though I told them about it, I had never used the thing until tonight. We saw that Fred was online, and I thought “Hey, we could TALK to Fred instead of just IM with him.” So I fired up Skype, which I had installed ages ago, and spent a few minutes trying to guess my password. When I cycled through the few I thought it might be, I decided that the unhelpful “Server Error” was not a password warning but a subtle hint to upgrade. So I got the release version instead of the beta I had, and we logged in and were talking within, literally, a minute. It was only that long because I had to type in my personal info (name, city, etc).
The audio was nice, even if there was a noticable lag as the data packets worked their way over my wireless network, over SBC’s DSL line, over the ether to Mexico, over Fred’s DSL, and then over Fred’s wireless network. But the fact that there were that many transitions in the stream and Skype navigated all of them cleanly was amazing.
My mother-in-law was online as well, and so we spent a minute figuring out how to conference call. We then all sat around and chatted for almost an hour; it was the first time my wife had talked to her brother– really talked instead of text’d– in months. And it was nice.
But that tagline still seems a little odd to me. “…that just works.” It does. As I mentioned before, we threw quite a few obstacles down and Skype dodged and weaved, made it through each one. Skype, indeed, just works.
What’s interesting to me is that that’s a selling point. Shouldn’t ALL technology “just work?” Shouldn’t every program I run “just work?” Why does this need to be said?
Of course, it needs to be said because not every program just works, not every peripheral is recognized as soon as you plug it in. You have to configure it.
Which is why, although Rendezvous Bounjour is such a nice little name, I still like the idea behind ZeroConf: it’s zero-configuration networking. It just works. I turn on my laptop and see the AirPort base stations, and iTunes notices the AirTunes plugged into my stero.
It’s one of the many reasons I use a Macintosh. It just works. I plug a mouse or a drive and and it’s there.
It’s one of the reasons I prefer Objective-C to Java; it just works. Sending messages to nil? Yeah, that’s not a problem; we understand.
I understand that VoIP is terribly complicated stuff. I understand that most everything interesting that computer science is doing these days is complicated. But that doesn’t mean that it has to appear complicated. Skype, my Mac, and ZeroConf are great examples.
Word, Windows, and Linux should learn from them.