Jeff pointed to Kevin pointing to a note on Skype's tipping point. We recently covered about Skype in the pieceSkype has a new competitor- Microsoft & more to follow. In an insightful note, James Enck writes, Verisign may have 900m internet users globally, and Point Topic counts 150m broadband lines at the end of 2004. At 30m registered users, Skype would appear to have penetrated 20% of its addressable market, and with around 2m concurrent users, more than 1% of the world's broadband population is running Skype at any given time. If 155m use MSN Messenger as reported in this Financial Times article, then Skype is ahead of MSN in terms of addressable market penetration, and in a much shorter period of time. May be worth bearing in mind that Skype's addressable market (& MSN's for that matter) is quite a bit more than the 150m broadband subscribers (probably ADSL + cable). It also includes businesses, govts, schools/universities, cybercafes etc with leased-line or other fast, shared connections." This clearly highlights the greater potential.While I am not sure how skype managed to get that many users, I agree with James that the potential market is indeed very high.
Category : Emerging Trends.
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