Toby Shapshak: Pattern Recognition

expensive fillip for Telkom’s coffers, were now free.

Microsoft made its largest ever acquisition in May 2011 and bought Skype for a gobsmacking $8.5bn. It seemed like folly then, and more so now, given the recent declines in its quality of service and general lack of innovation.

In many huge mergers, where firms are expected to assimilate into a new culture and adopt the priorities of their new overlords, the recently bought start-up tends to lose the plot for a while.

Skype used to be far more reliable than it has become lately. From being a regular Skype user, I’ve dropped it in favour of Apple’s FaceTime and more recently WhatsApp and WeChat calling.

Like Telkom, the erstwhile voice and landline incumbent, Skype, the VoIP incumbent, has seen its fortunes flipped by new upstarts that are sowing the fertile new markets ploughed by Skype and before it by the oldstyle business it disrupted.

With a text chat service during the early days that was as superior as its voice offering, Skype would swallow up Microsoft’s own messaging app in 2013, the clumsily named Windows Live Messenger, originally called MSN Messenger and an icon of the early days of the Internet.

This month Skype unveiled what many in the industry think is the next big thing: chatbots. These software robots will use text-based messaging to interact with customers, like a call centre agent would, I guess. These include a travel bot, another to book tickets to sports events and a SpockBot to “learn the ways of Vulcan logic”.

Skype, like Telkom — which has its own sci-fi-themed link, via a Star Wars association, having sponsored the reboot of the iconic film last December — is facing competition from the very new businesses its trailblazing disruption enabled. That’s what irony means.