Title: “How can they be so good?”: The strange story of Skype
Context: A brief history of the program, and people, that reinvented telephony.
Synopsis: How are great ideas born? Do they strike like a bolt of lightening, from parts unknown, unexplainable with untraceable origins? Or do they ferment over time, simmering just under our consciousness, aggregating the most meaningful sensory inputs until our brain spits out the end product? Surely the latter as the inseparability of hard work and divine inspiration proves time and again. Nothing happens in a vacuum, not even software. Especially not software. The great and disruptive things that seem commonplace today were laughable just a few short years ago, as the entrenched powers that built and rebuilt ever bigger monuments to their ego-fueled immortality yawned in the face of their own demise. Innovation and the genuinely new are much more likely to come from a few guys in Estonia than they are from the old guard.
Best Bit: “If we’re still sending e-mails, why did we even make Skype in the first place?”
via arstechnica.com
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