problem is, when you start dealing with -millions- of users, it's very difficult to please them all. I suppose they may be divided into groups anyway, at least two, if not more:
- those who use it for "fun" and are happy of mood or MSN-ish features
- those who use it for "work", perhaps on not-so-new computers, and really don't care about much else than calling and chatting - as long as it's fast and lean

how to make everyone happy? if you can't find a way, maybe let the users choose: a lite version as proposed may work, or just the option to say "no thanks, I don't want that extension installed, and no plugins for me, just -plain Skype-"

I agree the phrases on my blog are certainly "my feelings".
I also agree that the "most existing customers" is not based on a statistically sound sample of customers!
But ... as you know, i talk to other "existing" customers, and very few like it!

It could of course be that you are now attracting a bunch of customers who are indeed interested in all these fancy features like MSN has them. I am curious about the future of Skype!

But one thing i know: the growth of the active userbase has slowed down. This was confirmed in the EBay quarterly report, and can be seen on the growth of concurrent users online.

I wouldn't do all the blogging effort if i didn't like Skype. But,as you can understand, i am worried about its future!

Jean

I don't think it's necessarily feature bloat if users are allowed to simplify their setup by turning off features they don't use. I use Skype to make calls to landline phones, and that's about it. I don't mind downloading and installing the program with all its functionality turned on, but I'd be happier if I could then turn off more of the things I don't use (emoticons, video calling, group chat).

The thing that drives me nuts is the lack of obvious features like call recording. This is such a no-brainer, I know I'm not the first one to want it, and it continues to baffle me why it's not included by default.

So please, continue developing the software and adding things to it; that's what makes it useful. But it would be a much more satisfying user experience if we had greater control to mix and match the features we want and actually use. That would blunt the accusations of bloat and make the software more useful to a wider variety of people.

One word: Firefox.

Feature-rich enough for many people.
Extensible to allow it to have hundreds of thousands of extra features on demand.

Things that are currently broken from feature-creep? ICQ, MSN Messenger, MS Office, Yahoo, and, yes, Skype.

Things that aren't broken? Google, Google Talk, and Firefox.

Currently Skype for Windows is 22.5MB big. Thats huge! Have you tried downloading it over a 56k modem? It takes forever, and the first thing I do with it once it's installed is delete the Skype Extra's directory anyway. Surely you could make a version of Skype thats not quite so big, and have the extras as, well, extras? As it currently stands, Skype on its own, compressed, is still 14MB, which still takes forever on a dial-up modem. How many users does Skype have? 9 million or something? 9mil x 8.5MB savings = saving the world a lot of bandwidth.

Yes Villu, you have succumbed to the devilishly unspeakable.

Skype is already a big bloat. It was (and is) a VOIP application, which, currently takes around 30 or 40 Mb of RAM when signed in and in offline mode! (and yes, i do have 2G of RAM, and I do care about programs eating up system resources). And it fails to do it's basic task - there are the "presence" problems, as well as voice quality problems. On the other hand, what do I need paypal for ?? It's supported only in a small number of countries. Plugins are OK, but many times there are discrepancies between the extras manager description and the plugin's price/function.

Homework: go to Wikipedia and read the definition of "software bloat". Than open up skype and take a look at it. Now tell me which part of it is not bloat ...

My "fewer than ten blog comments" is stretching! And not only here!

I therefore repeat: “Time to listen to the customers Skype!”

No offense Villu Arak! Skype doesn't need to be like "Caffeine" but still ... simplicity versus bloat, this is the choice of Skype marketeers.

(Thanks for the word "bloat", it wasn't in my English vocabulary)

I have to agree with the majority of the users posting comments.
Skype has indeed succumbed to 'bloat'.
I remember (in the 'old days') when I freaked out when the latest version of Skype took up more than 15Mb of RAM. Heh.
So please listen to the public outcry, and do something about it! Whether a 'Lite' version, an advanced install, or anything that will give more control to the users.
After all, isn't that what Skype is about? Giving VoIP back to the users?

I'm actually much more partial to the UI of the Mac version versus the PC version. And I'm actually quite glad at this point that it hasn't succumbed to the feature creep so much as the PC version.

In all honesty, I haven't seen any compelling feature added since SMS. All of this personalization and zones stuff is silly to me, but obviously there is a market for it, otherwise it wouldn't be a part of Skype. So far, though most of it hasn't infiltrated the Mac version. (and for that I am grateful)

Whenever I install Skype on my PC, there are tons of options that I change to make the window as minimalist as I possibly can. For example, those tabs are ridiculous. There has to be a better way. Thankfully you can take them down to icon only. Better than nothing.

Thanks everyone. Keep 'em comments coming. Very useful stuff. And thanks, Jean, for dropping by!

I hate to be the one to disagree but I want more functionality built in. I want to be able to appear online to some and offline to others in my contact list (like yahoo messenger). I want a built-in Skype-provided call recorder. I want to be able to have more than one phone number per contact. I want to be able to log on to multiple Skype usernames from the same computer without complicated workarounds.

If people want a lite, give them a lite, but don't stop your steady and constant efforts to innovate and bring new features. Personally speaking, a download size of 25mb seems completely reasonable to me.

One thing I would say though is that you need to be ready to retire features which have minimal traction. I can't speak for everybody, but I have found Skypecasts and Skypefind to be pretty useless and populated with less than ideal content.

If you have a way of monitoring the average user activities, you will know exactly which features people are using most and which are just "fat". Routinely getting rid of "fat", or at least moving it to the add-on section, should be part of the development goals.

To "acceinlondon":
I agree with all your feature requests - although i have a skyperecorder with Pamela (www.pamela-systems.com).

"retire features which have minimal traction", yes this is exactly what i mean.

I am not "by definition" against new features:
chat, chat history, SMS, video, SkypeOut, SkypeIn, mood, import contacts, groups, and some others are features i like to use.

But indeed, video in the mood, all kinds of alerts and messages, SkypeFind, SkypeCast - i disabled it- ... are useless for me.

And it would be nice to be able to make a "light version" that suits everyones individual needs, through add-ons, disabling options or any other decent way.

So is now the right time to remind the Skype team of their talk of 'Naked Skype' from many years ago? That never surfaced, but may be the perfect way to ensure that feature bloat is kept to a minimum. eg, if there was a skype.dll or a skype.so that could be kept to a small disk/memory size then developers could choose whatever features to layer on top.

I agree with most of the others and I think that noone would care to write such long comments if he/she wouldn't care about Skype and like it.

I do not mind a 22MB download but the incredibly wasteful use of RAM is annoying. I vote for being able to turn as many options as possible off and customize a lot more. I also vote for finally providing a web-client for people on public computers or even people on dial-up.

Hejooooooooo

Hi everyone,

I also think that Skype is getting too big. It's okay when it's the only thing you run on your computer, but some people play games or listen music (or even both) while Skype is running. It takes a lot of space of my RAM... I don't think the "enable every feature you want" is such a good idea, because then you still have to download the full installer... except for Skype finds a better way to do it. A lite version would be the best solution in my opinion, so people could have both versions installed and switch between them whenever they want...

I still like Skype more than MSN anyway... it has a better interface

I agree. I am now a Mac user and I'm praying you don't "wreck" Skype for Mac with all that ugly Yahoo IM (circa 5 yrs ago) UI ugliness.

A more pressing point however though, is that from where I'm sitting, since you added video to Mac Skype (amen) very little seems to be happening.

Skype really needs to compete with iChat on Mac or we are going to end up ditching Skype for iChat in our organisation. More of us are getting Macs and iChat, especially with OS X Leopard's very very sweet app sharing looming and multi-way video chat already supported in Tiger, the case for skype is diminishing rapidly. We need reliable multi-way video and communication tools, no silly UI clutter like video mood messages etc.

Skype premium incoming calls is an interesting idea, I can see the value in that, but much of the other new skype offerings seem rather "WTF?". Skype was a massive innovator before, especially with the simple UI. I think it has veered off towards evil bloatware for sure, especially on Windows.