I follow entrepreneurial dramas the way other people follow sports (did somebody win the World Series?). In these comedies, tragedies, or farces, people really do rise beyond human limitations or get ignominiously crushed. Sometimes there are second chances. Entrepreneurs--true entrepreneurs--pride themselves, like none-too-bright boxers, on their ability to take a punch. But there aren't too many second chances.
Not like the second chance that is unfolding right now.
Among the greatest pieces of communications technology in our age of great communications technology, and hence, when it became the victim of corporate synergistic turpitude, the greatest failure, is Skype.
I still can't get over Skype. When I'm feeling low I think of it. It's like free food--the ability to make free phone calls. And it's free phone calls with video. The picture phone has been the grail of communications since the dawn of telecommunications time and suddenly it arrived and it was free. Skype is the true community and social networking technology. Skype is the broadcast medium of the future. Skype is the quantum leap forward of time and space.
So imagine the pain, indeed the existential madness, its founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, must have felt when they sold Skype to eBay in 2005 and eBay, which shortly came to regret the $2.6 billion it paid for the company, let it languish. EBay did nothing, except bicker with the company's founders, who were still managing the company (and argue over payouts and bonuses). Skype became a technology that existed without development or strategy.
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