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This is a repost from http://www.strategyeye.com/articles/digitalmedia/id/24649416.

Interesting to watch this progress – the take-up of anti-monopoly solutions like Skype since the Global Financial Crisis has been incredible (until, of course, Skype becomes a monopoly itself and people move on to the next thing).

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) service Skype has cemented its position as the biggest carrier of international calls, finishing 2009 with a 12% share of all international call minutes – a huge 50% increase on 2008 figures. The results come from a report by TeleGeography, which says Skype handled more than 54bn minutes of calls last year, an increase of 64% on 2008.

Skype’s growth is accelerating despite a slowdown in the market overall. International call volume has grown at an annual rate of 15% over the past 25 years, but in the last two years it has slowed to just 8%, growing from 376bn minutes in 2009 to 406bn a year later.

“Demand for international voice has been remarkably robust, but it’s clearly not recession-proof,” says TeleGeography analyst Stephan Beckert. “However the volume of traffic routed via Skype is tremendous. Skype is now the largest provider of cross border communications in the world, by far.”

Skype has experienced record growth in the past year, hitting more than 520m users in October. It is expected to have reached an even bigger user total when owner eBay reports its Q4 earnings later this week. The service also recently broke its record for the most concurrent users logged on when almost 22.3m people signed into Skype at the same time.

“Skype remains the sole VoIP juggernaut, and it has clearly hit a tipping point,” says Beckert. “I know because my grandmother has started using it.”

eBay must be kicking themselves after selling Skype last year for $1.9 billion after buying it September 2005 for $2.6 billion. That’s a $700 million write-down, and it may be that they pulled stumps at exactly the wrong time.

And as an aisde, my Grandma user Facebook AND Skype… Go Grammy!

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Baby Boomer: “Oh yeah, those young tackers will never achieve anything – they are always on their mobiles and that Tweeter thing.”
Gen Y: “Those old farts have no idea what’s going on…”

One of the saddest things that I often see and hear is the generation gap between Gen X/Y and the Baby Boomers. It’s long been my view that the flow of information, knowledge, and above all wisdom across the generation gaps is pivotal to lasting progress.

From the perspective of a Gen X/Y (right on the cusp of the transition between the two) the old adage of “standing on the shoulders of giants” is not just about the famous and the successful. I work on the principle that you can learn something from ANYONE, and it behooves the younger generations to make time to listen and glean the wisdom of experience from those who’ve gone before us. Sure, the world they grew up it looked very different to ours, but the challenges, mistakes made, and lessons learnt are largely the same.

The same thing applies the other way around too. The younger generations are naturally more in touch with the progression of their environment than older generations can be (i.e. you can’t teach an old dog new tricks… while not entirely true, their is truth to it). The boomers still control large chunks of the governance of the world around us – CEO’s, politicians, those generally in power are mostly of a generation that is rapidly falling out of touch with the increasing pace of progress. It’s not a bad thing, just a natural progression – but it pays for them to listen when young people speak.

The most successful organizations I deal with leverage the strengths of both the old (in governance) and the young (in progress and strategy) to stay on top of their game. I personally have the privilege of working with some “old dogs” in the industry who get this principle and share their wisdom freely, while taking on board the “next-gen” contribution I bring to their business.

I sum it up like this:

The young ought to listen to the old for what they’ve seen. The old ought to listen to the young for what they see.