An interview with Skylook

Jeremy Hague, Skylook's CEO, was kind enough to give me a little time and answer some questions this weekend. Ever since I'd mentioned Skylook a while back I was fascinated by his company, and the space where they operate (as a plug-in to two popular desktop apps). Skylook, for those who don't know, uses Outlook to manage your contacts, IM, voicemail, appointments, etc. in Skype, but also fully integrates recording of Skype conversations into Outlook. It's a convenient and natural extension of both apps, and quite frankly I can't give it justice in words. You have to use it. It's cool.

So in light of Skype's acquistion by eBay, and the general state of desktop apps in general, I wanted to ask Jeremy his take on all this and more... Read the full interview after the jump.


Q: What do you think of Skype's acquisition by eBay?
 
A: I guess it comes down to what you think people mostly talk about.  Do they mostly talk about buying and selling stuff?
 
eBay likes Skype because strong markets rely on communication and efficient
sharing of information.  They want Skype because it lets people talk about
buying and selling stuff.  And they're going to take Skype and develop it in that direction.
 
The question is, where does that leave the conversations that aren't about
buying and selling stuff?  Does eBay think they can do a great job at
servicing all conversations?
 
If they think they can do it all, we feel that that is a tall order for an
eCommerce company.  We obviously hope they will be successful, but have our
doubts about whether they will be.  If they don't think they can do it all,
it's probably good for eBay, but it spells the end for Skype as the predominant free PC-based VoIP provider.  The vast majority of conversations are just not about buying and selling stuff.

Q: Will this affect Skylook? Feel free to elaborate if you can.

A: Absolutely.  Depending on what happens it could have a huge effect on us.

Let's say eBay focus purely on making communications work extremely well for eCommerce.  The obvious example is to make it really easy for buyers and sellers to talk about forthcoming transactions.  There will be a load of nice things eBay can do to streamline the whole process.  And let's say that the non-eCommerce VoIP market share withers on the vine, intentionally or not.  Where would that leave Skylook?

Well that depends on what we do between now and then!  So what we need to do is to sit down and make some bets about how we think this will pan out.  One way would be to assume that all of the above will come to pass, and start to move the product in a similar direction.  This would mean really extending Skylook in a direction that would assist users with conducting eCommerce.

Another way would be to not concern ourselves so much with eCommerce, but start to position Skylook to work with who we think will become the predominant VoIP provider(s).  As with most business decisions, nothing is certain and it's impossible to know the best move.  We can however with plenty of analysis and careful thought, make some reasonably good bets.

 

 

Q: Some people have said, and I don't necessarily agree with them, that programming desktop apps for Windows is a dying art. We certainly aren't seeing the growth of say, the Windows 95 or 98 days, are we? How would you respond to people who would say don't program desktop apps?

A: I would say "Good Luck!" if they were trying to write Skylook!  I think web browser technology and web programming practices are continually advancing. This means that the browser is becoming suitable for more and more apps. However there are still a large number of apps for which it doesn't make sense to use a web browser.  I expect this number to decline in the future, but not to down to zero or even close.  I also expect the distinction to blur somewhat - much of the interesting web-based code being written today, for instance what Google is doing with the AJAX techniques for Javascript, is served up from a web site on demand but still runs on the desktop.

When my PC can talk to the net as fast as my CPU talks to my memory bus, that's the end of the road for the desktop!

Q: (following up) Do think web services will eclipse desktop apps?

A: For certain classes of applications, yes.  For instance for CRM, Financials, ERP and those types of commercial applications it just makes so much more sense to build around web services and web-based front-ends.

When the app needs much richer interaction with the specialized hardware on the desktop, such as a rich GUI, sound card interactions etc. it obviously makes little sense to do it as a web-based app.

Ecommerce is a good example of an area where the web will completely take over.  A good example is eSellerate, which we use for Skylook sales.  They have a great system and it's ready to roll from the day you decide to use it.  No client installation, always up to date with the latest updates, no headaches with backups.

Q: You've taken a somewhat niche product (Skype), although I guess it will get bigger now, and glued it together with the 800-lb. gorilla of email clients: Outlook. What led to this decision?

A: Currently, we are small, so 50 million users seems somewhat non-niche to us! I guess we saw that many many people were starting to use Skype, and we thought that a product that could help as many of those users as possible would have a good chance of success.

Outlook is much-derided these days, but the fact is that it has an incredibly large user base.  To our minds there was little doubt that a huge number of Skype users would also be Outlook users.

So we started to think about what it was about Outlook, and email in general, that people find useful, over and above the core act of sending and receiving messages.  What is it about email, which is a very mature technology, that may be missing from newer technologies such as VoIP?

It didn't take long to figure out that one of the great things about email is that you have a record of your communications.  One thing that Outlook is pretty good at is allowing you to organize and archive your emails in such a way as to make them accessible when you need to go back and check what you told someone or what they told you.

And this happens to be a current weakness in Skype.  Skype does not have a recording facility.  It will keep track of the fact that you made a call and who you made it to but of course you have no way of going back and hearing what was said.  Skype will store IM chats, but these are not easily indexed or searchable.  You can't organize and categorize your Skype IM's the way you can organize and categorize emails in Outlook.

So put simply, Skylook brings these very useful Outlook capabilities that currently only work for email, and introduces them to the world of VoIP and IM.

Q: Are there plans to develop Skylook for any other email clients or other apps?

A: On the email side we have had a lot of requests to do a version for Thunderbird and this is something that we monitor closely.

On the VoIP/IM side, there is obvious potential with GoogleTalk, Gizmo, Yahoo, MSN and others.  We are constantly talking to people about all of these options and continually reassessing where our R&D dollar will best be spent.

Q: How has the response been to Skylook?

A: We have had a great response to Skylook so far.  The best response that we have had has been from the online blogging community – bloggers who blog in the Skype arena.

We have made a healthy amount of sales since our launch 5 weeks ago and we are now starting to reinvest that revenue back into the business in the area of online advertising to help spread the word about Skylook.

Q: What led you personally to doing this kind of work?

A: The main reason was that I wanted a tool that would do the stuff that Skylook does but there was nothing available on the web.  I have always been interested in software and I see VoIP technology (both soft and hard clients) as a huge growth area.

Q: What are some uses the average consumer might not realize are possible using Skylook? (for instance, couldn't you do a sort of collaborative podcast this way? just a thought)

A: Well, you could use it for collaborative podcasts ;)  There are a lot of little things that we built in that may not be so obvious.  For instance, you can click on an email and reply to it with a voice call, or vice-versa.  You can click on an appointment and immediately start a call with one of the invitees.  The product’s aim is to make VoIP and IM work in smoothly with the mature world of Email, so we are continually looking to add features that make that happen.

Q: What's the preferred snack at Skylook HQ?

A: “2 LARGE cappuccinos – 1 strong (for Jeremy)”

Tags: ceo, commercial, ebay, interview, jeremy+hague, JeremyHague, skylook, skype