Download slowdown & bug

Vengeance and hatred is not a good motivator to blog. Jamie Watson helped a lot of Skype forum visitors, especially on video problems, until he was banned because he didn’t respect some basic forum behaviour rules. Since that time he is – through his blog - throwing around a lot of bullshit, lies, exaggerations, and statements taken out of their context, only to satisfy his own ego! This is a pity, he is loosing every bit of credibility!

My time to complain however! I tried to download the new Skype client version “3.8.0.115” on my Windows XP laptop, and i got the older 3.6 version. I even tried to download it through 3 different browsers. Then i tried it on my “Vista Desktop” and hurrah! I could download the latest version without problems. Strange that Skype doesn’t solve that bug, it is already many months old! Confusing for inexperienced computer users and bad for the image of Skype! Not everyone is affected however. But the good news, and whatever Jamie Watson will tell you: the new version solved some problems for me, and the call quality is excellent as almost always!

More about the downloads …
As suddenly as the speed of downloads went up around the end of February, as suddenly it went down around April 15. I speculated that the rise of downloads was due to the Oprah Winfrey effect in the USA, but why did it stop so suddenly (see the red curve on the graph below)?It even seems that the download speed is lower then at the beginning of this year.
There is however no clear correlation between the number of downloads and the users online:

• From January 1 till April 7 "peak users online" grew with 2 million!
• The increase of download speed started at February 25 and stopped at April 17
• "Peak users online" went slightly down from 12.7 million to 12.4 million at peak time in the last 4 weeks!

Why are "concurrent users online" not growing anymore? I can only speculate here …
I guess Christmas presents end of 2007 generated some indirect Skype boosting effects:

• new computers, webcams, Skype compatible phones, upgrades to Windows Vista, mobiles with internet access, etc. ... but the effect of this on Skype has stopped!
  
• and, the Oprah Winfrey effect also stopped.

Again: this is only speculation!