Skype Growth Continues To New Highs

Skype achieves 40 million concurrent users.

Skype continues its growth this month and it is obvious that Microsoft has pretty much let the company run the ship. That is evident in the continuing reports of records being broken for the number of users on Skype at the same time. They have been making announcements this year and it continues to be positive information.

Skype seems to have a unique way of presenting things that is far different than what you might expect to hear from other companies. In their blog making the announcement of 40 million concurrent users, they seem to attempt to put things into perspective in a unique way. This is definitely not your average PR announcement.

Between three and four millennia ago, sometime between 2000 BC and 1000 BC, the world's population stood at 40 million people. Early civilizations like the Egyptians, Phoenicians and the Minoans focused their trading efforts on the sea, building centers of commerce all along the Mediterranean. Letters using these early peoples' alphabet took weeks or months to travel on the sea or overland by boat, horse or foot.

Well, the world certainly has changed a lot since then. Today, we have seven billion people on Earth, and there are centers of commerce almost everywhere. With changes in technology and mechanized forms of transportation, letters (surprisingly) still takes days to get from person to person, while email takes just seconds.

But one of the biggest changes is one we reached today - when 40 million concurrent users were signed onto Skype all at once. This is a massive new milestone for a simple piece of software that helps make meaningful connections a cool part of people's lives every single day.

Skype Premium
This comes after Skype released their Skype Premium product and we have produced the Skype Group Guide for your reference. Skype's future did not look as bright a few years back when Google Voice came out and Google was offering free phone calls. Skype has made a number of changes to improve their services and the result is evident in the numbers. The move to take advantage of business conferencing needs has been very positive for Skype and will result in revenue expansion for them this year.

Whether you need to take advantage of the Skype Premium feature depends on your needs. For those who do not need to collaborate with associates on the web, you probably are not going to need the additional services which they provide. But if you could use the following features, then you should consider it.

• Group Video Call


• Group Screen Sharing


• No partner advertising


• Live Customer Support


• Unlimited calling to a country of your choice

The no partner advertising and unlimited calling to a country of your choice make this interesting to consider. As usual, there are limitations. For the moment, pricing is $9.99 per month, or $4.99 per month if you pay for a full year. The pricing is competitive and the features for collaboration are worth looking at. These items are similar to those offered by competitors WebEx and Go To Meeting.

So the obvious question is how long is it going to take them to break the 50 million concurrent users? Given they hit 35 million on March 5th, that would tend to indicate they will achieve the 50 million mark by June.