If you work for a big company, you've probably come across enterprise software. Quite why people use the term any more I'm not sure — it usually goes in sentences along with things like 'hosted mid-tier solution' and the dreaded 'deployment'.

Not, of course, that I mean to poke too much fun at jargon per se — it's useful in the right context — but there's so much wrong with the way these products are described. Many people, like Peter Merholz, have been predicting their demise for some time.

I was prompted by a post on the Future of Software blog to think about where Skype sits relative to other software products. Is it an 'enterprise software solution'? Is it a 'productivity enhancement suite'? I hope not.

Here's how we describe Skype:

> Skype is a little piece of software that lets you make free calls to anyone else on Skype, anywhere in the world.

Skype does a lot more than that, of course, but we like to keep things simple in the first instance.

However, if what you're looking for is an enterprise-ready multi-platform VoIP/IM/video communications solution, we do those too