Common Sense Cannibalization

Mat Ingram has a good post about Getty and the need for that company to take a far different approach with respect to her business. 

While in Estonia, we had a chance to spend about an hour with Sten Tamkivi, the operations guy for Skype.  Shel has a post here which gives a nice overview.

One of the more interesting things Sten talked about was the SkypeIn/Out calls and the minutes being bought.  With that typical, 28 year old Estonian smile, he pointed out that Skype is in the business of eating itself.

He made the point that Skype's expectation was that somebody would buy a minimal amount of minutes, call a friend someplace and tell the friend to download skype so the rest of the calls could be free. While it made perfect sense when he said it, the interesting observation was the fact Skype stayed true to a particular belief (free phone calls/connectivity open up opportunities else ware) and didn't get sucked into the siren song of the chasing of the minutes revenue.

He pointed out that post-Ebay, there hasn't been anybody worrying about protecting that revenue.  Common sense cannibalization seemed to be the order of the day.

When I mentioned that I used SkypeOut for conference calls, getting around 800 numbers not working outside of the US, etc, he gave me another smile and simply said "Thank you."