I’m going to mention my mate Keith Smith again in this one, as he posted a lament to the passing of Skype, I commented, but I continued to ruminate and thought I’d expand it to 2 cents…
So, as Microsoft sunsets Skype and forces its users, many of them reluctantly (trust me, my Dad is one of them) to Teams, Skype joins the long list of companies, like Netscape, Palm, Blackberry, Yammer, Rackspace, Napster, Siebel, Remedy, PeopleSoft and many others that either created a category, defined it or dominated it, to now be replaced by some up and coming vendor that came up on rails and took their lunch.
Nice mix of metaphors there, stealing race horses’ lunches? Anyway…
These guys were all disrupted to the point of extinction (or close to it) by Google, Apple iPhone, Slack, Spotify, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Workday.
Yes, we can debate how extinct some of the “legacy players” really are, but however ardent a fan of Oracle’s Peoplesoft you might be, they are no longer the force they once were in that category.
My personal favorite, from my career working with Content Management Systems, is not quite so mainstream and definitely not extinct. But, it’s the first true SaaS CMS (as far as I am aware), CrownPeak, founded in 2001 before the whole world went SaaS.
They were a competitor, I’ve never worked there, and I’ve never understood why they didn’t clean up while all the major vendors were pretending with financing models, hosting, and PaaS, and squirming when the awkward SaaS questions came.
Yet, these guys had gazed into the enterprise software crystal ball and struck on SaaS, before it was cool – they were first, but maybe too soon.
There are so many examples of companies that were, as the cool kids say, “the OG” (original) and failed to become the GOAT (Greatest of All Time).
I have the same feeling about Skype, how did it not win?
As I shared in my comment to Keith’s post, along came the VID, and we all Zoomed off to Zoom, and it’s now in the language, like “to Hoover” is “to vacuum”.
I am sure there is plenty of analysis on why Skype has not won. However, the lesson I am taking from this and sharing here is that being first or early does not guarantee success. If you have an idea for a product, service, or even a blog post, but it’s already taken, why stop?
Yes, I know, like this post and lesson – not original, but not stopped.
I wonder if anyone whispered the word “Skype” in a meeting in 2011 when Eric Yuan launched the first release of Zoom, as a reason he should cool his heels?
I suspect not.
After all, after being founded in 2003, Skype was already the category Daddy, and 2011 was the same year Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion, arguably at its peak. Aside from the fact that Yuan came from Cisco, so probably believed that Webex (remember that?) was there for the taking. Whatever competitor they had their eye on, not being original did not deter the founders of Zoom.
I am pretty sure my rudimentary research might raise some eyebrows here; someone knows who the first P2P voice, video, and screen sharing app thingy probably was, but in terms of things people have heard of, hopefully my point holds.
You don’t have to invent a category to dominate it – you need to key into what the people really want.
You don’t need to be the OG to be the GOAT.
Fancy more of this?
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I’m a 3xCMO, now a marketing strategy advisor and podcast host at Rockstar CMO. Although, I’m not a rock star, but a marketing leader, strategist, content marketer, columnist, speaker, industry watcher, and creator of ART (Awareness, Revenue, and Trust) for the companies I work with. But most of all, I am an enthusiastic tea drinker.
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