Skype President Josh Silverman in a rare blog entry discusses the importance of listening to customers and how it shapes Skype product development.

He said Skype is taking consumer input so seriously it now has a weekly "Feedback War Room to keep things right - a first in our almost five-year history."

He said: "You may have noticed the mid-June launch of Skype 4.0 beta 1 for Windows. While creating this revamped version of Skype was partly a practical move - not unlike moving from a tiny student flat to a more spacious home - it also belies a significant effort to analyze Skype's evolving role in people's lives and to see the findings reflected in how it looks, behaves and interacts. As one user put it, these days, Skype is 'more than just a chat program'."

Silverman said: "Customers are good at telling you about explicit, or articulated, problems. There may be call-quality issues. Or they can't figure out how to use Skype to send an SMS. It's not the customer's job to fix these things, obviously. That's our job. By tweaking the audio engine or improving usability, these problems can be solved."

He describes the thinking on development of integrated communications in version 4.0: "Previously, text chat, voice, video, file transfers etc. have been separate channels organized by time. The central idea behind 4.0 is to organize conversations by person, not by channel.

"At first, it may feel counterintuitive. (Although I think intuition here probably isn't innate, but has been conditioned by the mechanics of the current channel architecture.) Millions of people depend on Skype, and have invested time in getting comfortable with how it used to work. So change naturally sparks resistance. But it's immensely satisfying to see initial skepticism wane after a few days with 4.0.

"Is the current iteration of 4.0 a fait accompli? No, which is why we're looking at your reactions: gathering behavioral data and listening intently to what beta users are telling us.

"The next version of 4.0 will be much closer to its final form and best behavior. Don't worry, it will indeed include 'compact mode,' so you can reduce the real estate that Skype takes up on the screen. Among other things we're working on, instant messages will be more visible and alerts and notifications will be improved."

He added: "Today, I work at Skype, a company that grew on top of an extraordinary innovation: free worldwide calls. And let me tell you, at this very moment, we have folks twiddling with their monocles, microscopes and X-ray machines to see the invisible ink. To figure out what the world is telling us. And we have folks who try to translate the message we think we've read into the next innovation. Often, it leads us nowhere. It's a tall order. But we'll doggedly keep at it. And when we think we're onto something, we'll invite you to play with the thing.

Read on in Silverman's blog.