Skype Product Recall

I'm one of the early adaptors of SkypeOut. SkypeOut was the only reason I instantly downloaded Skype and told my friends of this disrupting innovation. I don't feel like an early beta user who has already been rewarded by being there early. I didn't know prices where subject to change.

Skype Phone Beta testers were very disappointed with the public release of Skype 1.0 and swamped the public bulletin boards with complaints today and criticism on Skype users web blogs.

Many of these first Skype users also subscribed to SkypeOut, a service which also allows you to make calls from your PC Skype Phone to any telephone in the world, at greatly competitive prices - greatly that is - until today.

The bulletin boards on Skype are now swamped with complaints at a price hike with the release of the first official version yesterday, averaging around 40% increase in prices, some destinations being up 500%.

These testers, who are at present still almost the entire Skype community, are not upset only by the price increases but the manner in which it was done: no warning, no announcement, and no honouring of existing account balances. (Adam King, Mathaba.net, 07/28)

Skype should be ready for a recall of the public release of Skype 1.0. Nothing to worry about. Everything we always wanted to know about product recalls is already on the Internet. For instance, look at When Bad Things Happen to Good Companies or The Ready Recall Program. I believe Skype needs some lessons learned too. Why should it take the unnecesarry risk of a large recovery and rehabilitation effort?