Skype

Software As A Service has been one of the big success stories in softare post the .com crash. The pitch was that you should be able to treat your software like the utilities you subscribed to and worry about them just as much. And it was a pretty good pitch when you were handing over your keys to small, hungry, and nimble companies that could afford to only hire execellent programmers.

Skype users found out this week that things can change mighty quickly. This week almost all Skype users lost the ability to log into the service and make phone calls. For a number of companies Skype has been the communications backbone for their distributed teams -- these companies are now scrambling to come up with alternate communication plans, presumably bootstrapping email or whatnot. Skype is free for most users, who are getting every bit of service that they paid for, but even the paying ones are getting screwed right now. Skype's a good company and I would expect that they'll happily refund the subscription costs for part, or all, of this month, but its highly unlikely that those costs reflect even a small portion of the total cost of this outage.

These problems shouldn't surprise us. Who really likes their utility companies? We generally are forced to expect very little from them, and certainly rarely get the customer service we might really need. Once you've given up control over your data to a SaaS system, your relationship to this services is akin to a utilit -- exactly how many excellent options do you have left? Skype isn't a particularly evil company, by and large, they remain highly user focused and I believe that their engineers are working as rapidly as possible to resolve the problem, but they can't help you out of your complete communication blackout problem if you've relied on them too closely.

As more and more products are released that have minimal technical barriers to entry we are developing companies that develop various forms of user lockin, in order to maintain their subscriber base. As these user bases grow and the value of the subscription annuity exceeds the value of future customer wins, its only natural that firms stop innovating and start counting their money. Leaving you in the cold, and having to suck up the costs o switching services or dealing with obsolete, or completely failing, services.

Things like this make me wonder if its really true that open APIs to web services solve the problems of not having open source web services.