August 29, 2011 archive

Aug 29

Happy Birthday, Skype! Celebrating 8 Years of Disruption

skypelogo-shadow.pngIt was 8 years ago today that the first public beta version of Skype was released... and so began the amazing journey of a product/service that has truly disrupted the telecommunications industry. The Wikipedia page on Skype has a good record of the history, which is interesting to look back upon now.

I started using Skype sometime in early 2005 or so... working in Mitel's Office of the CTO charged with evaluating new technology - and seeking to understand what Skype was all about. I started writing about Skype then... and still continue writing a good bit about Skype as it is certainly one of the more disruptive players in the industry. Skype today is a HUGE part of my daily life and truly is one service that is integral to my daily workflow and life online.

Skype's blog post today, of course, focuses on their current fixation on video calls... even including the strange text (my emphasis added):

What started off as a little idea to connect the world over video calls has turned into something so much more, and we believe this is making a huge difference in making the world feel smaller and a lot more connected.

I don't actually know the ideas of the original founders of Skype, but I do know that in the actual early days of Skype it was all about audio versus video. Perhaps they had the grand dream then of video and had to focus on the reality of audio... or perhaps this is just the current Skype marketing trying to focus on their current messaging around video.

From my perspective, the 8 years of Skype thus far have:

  • completely destroyed the expensive costs of international telephony;
  • provided people a real viable option to use video telephony;
  • introduced people to the idea that you could have audio calls that sounded FAR better than the PSTN via wideband audio codecs;
  • gave people a true multi-modal "unified communications" experience with the ability to easily migrate between chat, audio, video, file sharing and screen sharing;
  • provided the industry with a solid example of secure communications using SRTP (while the carriers were whining about how they couldn't use SRTP because it would be too demanding on their infrastructure);
  • provided an incredible example of the power of persistent group chats;
  • provided an example of what a simple and easy user experience could be in a world of cluttered interfaces; (although some may argue that ended with Skype 5.x)
  • gave we who are fascinated by networks and amazing example of a peer-to-peer communications system; and
  • provided an example of a product that can "just work" from behind pretty much any network configuration including layers of NAT, firewalls, etc., etc.

... and so much more. It's been a fascinating service and company to watch, write about and use their products.

Oh, it hasn't all be great, of course... the business side of Skype has been all over the place. The partner/developer programs are on their 7th or 8th iteration. Various other programs have come and gone (SkypeCasts? Extras?). Skype has pursued it's incredibly fractured product management strategy across the multiple different operating systems.

But all in all it has certainly been fun to have Skype around ... and it sure has disrupted the industry!

What lies ahead now that Skype is slated to become part of Microsoft? Much remains to be seen... but odds that when their 9th birthday rolls around they won't be quite the same disruptive troublemakers that they are today. We'll see.

Meanwhile... Happy Birthday, Skype!

And two other friends have shared their thoughts today:

And here is Skype's birthday video... slickly produced with a message that does indeed celebrate the communications power that Skype has brought to our world:

I'm looking forward to seeing where the next 8 years of Skype takes us...

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Aug 29

The Hellacious Purgatory of Waiting

Waiting

Waiting sucks.

There is no other way to say it. More polite phrasings simply do not convey the correct emphasis. Waiting sucks.

And now... we wait.

Two weeks ago we visited my wife's oncologist to learn what would be the treatment options for her breast cancer now that the mastectomy was done. Naively, we thought based on what we had heard after the operation that all we would really be talking about was whether or not it made sense for her to start taking a hormone drug, Tamoxifen, for the next five years. There are some various medical history issues that raised some questions about that... so we thought our discussion would be about that.

The oncologist at our local hospital sat down with us for what turned out to be most of 2 hours. She walked us through my wife's pathology report and started out talking about all the positive aspects of the report... but with an unspoken "BUT..." hanging out there... until the "but" was spoken... and a word we thought we'd never hear was voiced:

"Chemo"

We figured with the tumor rather drastically removed (since the entire breast is gone) and the sentinel lymph node coming back clear, we were done with any thoughts of chemotherapy.

And we may be... or chemo may be back on the table.

Unfortunately, my wife's tumor turned out to be invasive breast cancer and as such there is a danger that it could spread into other parts of the body and morph into other forms of cancer. The "sentinel" lymph node was clear, meaning that there was no sign that cancer was regularly spreading into the rest of her body... BUT... there is always the chance that a small amount of the cancerous cells could have already spread into her body and not left any sign in the lymph nodes.

The oncologist had an interesting viewpoint:

My wife will never have as little cancer in her body as she does right now.

It took me a moment to wrap my brain around that one. The reality is that with the tumor gone and with the sentinel lymph node clear, odds are that IF any cancer made it out into the rest of the body it is only out there in a tiny amount - and has not yet started to attack other cells.

So now is the time to do everything possible to kill it.

Hence considering chemo as an option.

waiting ...could be the hardest thing.

Of course, the insanely frustrating aspect of all of this is:

There may be ZERO cancer cells in my wife's body!

They may in fact have been completely removed with the tumor. But there is no way to know... and it comes down to what level of risk you want to assume and how comfortable you are playing the odds that the cancer is gone.

Hence the waiting.

They are doing another round of blood tests and actual tests on my wife's tumor, specifically an Oncotype DX test, to help provide more data to determine whether chemo would really help fight the specific cancer my wife had/has. It turns out that for a certain % of women, chemotherapy really isn't that effective, for a certain % it is very helpful, and another % is in the middle of those two sides.

Into which category does my wife fall?

For that we wait... "7-10 business days" is how long the test takes once they get her tumor... and while you are waiting that seems like an agonizingly long time.

And so we wait.

And wait.

Stuck in an unwelcome purgatory... unable to make concrete plans for the next few months... unable to understand what our future holds... paused in a limbo where life seems to be on hold - even while the everyday life around us must continue.

Just waiting for a call that says the test results are in and we can sit down and start to understand what comes next.

Waiting sucks.

And so we wait...

Image credits: mag3737 and 25182350@N03 on Flickr.