> Sure, p2p is cool for us engineers. But why the end user ever cares about it?
Skype really was the killer communication app with the killer feature: voice and video over IP, for free. It offered paid calling (for a fairly reasonable if not particularly low price), even international.
End users (other than gamers or enterprise) cared about privacy and decentralization. Not many end users, but perhaps many who made recommendations to their peers about what VoIP software to use.
At the time, the main competition was MSN (terrible UX, later merged into Skype), TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble/RogerWilco (focused on gamers and generally terrible UX), or enterprise-focused SIP software.
Later came FaceTime (Apple-only), Facebook Messenger (privacy invasive), WhatsApp (after Facebook, and basically the same as Facebook Messenger these days), Telegram (Russian spyware), and Signal (not popular).
Skype really was the killer communication app with the killer feature: voice and video over IP, for free. It offered paid calling (for a fairly reasonable if not particularly low price), even international.
End users (other than gamers or enterprise) cared about privacy and decentralization. Not many end users, but perhaps many who made recommendations to their peers about what VoIP software to use.
At the time, the main competition was MSN (terrible UX, later merged into Skype), TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble/RogerWilco (focused on gamers and generally terrible UX), or enterprise-focused SIP software.
Later came FaceTime (Apple-only), Facebook Messenger (privacy invasive), WhatsApp (after Facebook, and basically the same as Facebook Messenger these days), Telegram (Russian spyware), and Signal (not popular).