Skype suffers worldwide crash

“The service began to crash around 12:15pm UK time, kicking people offline and freezing when they tried to log back in again. Other users who remained online had difficulties making calls. Restarting your PC or reinstalling Skype has no effect, as the problem is evidently on Skype’s end,” Wilson reports. “It’s just over two weeks since Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5bn, much to the dismay of many of its users. During it’s unlikely that Microsoft would make any deliberate changes that would cause instability in its new VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) subsidiary, the seemingly coincidental timing of this massive outage has led to rampant speculation about what it could be up to.”

Wilson reports, “A number of people instantly began slating Microsoft over the crash, suggesting that it was working on things behind the scenes to make the service as crash-prone as Windows itself.”

David Einhorn, a hugely influential hedge fund manager yesterday called for Ballmer’s ouster. I’m afraid msft stockholders are started to notice what we’ve known here for decades: the man’s level of competence does not rise past that of a local auto dealer salesman. Okay, I’ll give him sales manager, however he knows nothing about innovation and nothing about running a large corporation in a competitive environment.

When the board all things considered does to him what he does to chairs, expect them to contact every significant Apple exec and offer to quadruple their salary to take his place.

Einhorn didn’t mince words in that statement, either. The momentum is growing to oust Ballmer. Like as not it’s time to invest in Microsoft.. So then, perhaps not. Windows earnings are declining and the rest of the business is so fragmented it borders on schizophrenia.

If only there were another service that could be used with a NEW billion dollar server farm to work as a hub handling the video calls. Perhaps Apple could do it and call their service iChat or FaceTime and they could build a solid OS, internet service and small hand help devices to use it. Someone should suggest it to Apple.

Remember when MS purchased Danger, and soon afterwards Sidekick users experienced a huge data loss? Then, I read an article that explained that whenever Microsoft acquires a research stack, they on the spur of the moment set about converting the components of that stack to Microsoft innovation. At MS, the engineers of the acquired company are by and large eliminated or ignored while this process.

The case of Danger

In the case of Danger, I believe that their servers were running Sun Solaris/Linux/Oracle. The effort to convert those servers to Microsoft server innovation without input from the engineers that built the stack was cited as the cause of that snafu.