Gilda.
I'm Chelsea Daniels and this is the Front Page, a daily podcast presented by The New Zealand Herald. After twenty two years, video calling platform Skype is shutting down. After its inception, to Skype became a verb and it was the go to service for many years, that is until COVID nineteen and Zoom took over. So how has something once thought to be so innovative become so obsolete? Who decides what apps and sites we migrate to? And looking to the future, what could be the next big bang
or bust? Today on the front Page, Victoria University of Wellington Professor of Information Systems Alex Richter joins us to discuss the fickle world of tech.
Alex.
Skype amassed more than three hundred million monthly users at its peak. Many of us grew up knowing that to video call someone was to skype someone. Where in the world did it all go wrong?
I think a lot of this is because of lost opportunity during COVID, where Skype basically competed with Zoom and maybe also a bit with teams. And the big advantage that assume had was that it was very simple to you, so Skype had actually a very good opportunity at the infrastructure, the user base. As you say, it was actually a synonym for even like video conferencing. But Zoom had this instant, frictionless success, whereas the Skype interface was increasingly complex from
a user perspective, especially during COVID. That's when this simplicity basically one. Yeah, millions of users over for soon, and Skype, which was already owned by Microsoft them at some point, was in the eyes, I guess of Microsoft no longer that successful.
I can think of a lot of platforms and applications that were once part of our daily lives and they've just faded into the background almost. I'm thinking of like MySpace being one of them, overtaken by Facebook, then Instagram. How do we just all of a sudden decide to just stop using one and move to another.
Yeah, in the case of MySpace is actually also very interesting. I would say it's another design principle. So for Skype, it was in my eyes it was simplicity. For my Space, I would say it was the activity streams that they didn't have. So MySpace it let users personalize their pages endlessly and had a lot of cool features but they were really slow to adopt this activity streamed at Facebook, Head and Twitter. This is a core social feature of
was for many users. They were there because they wanted to connect with others. They wanted to have this constant stree of awareness what's going on for others. And while it turns out users, especially on these platforms are not dead loyal, they want easy In both cases, they want easy access, easy anti creations, and basically the interfaces that work for them. So in both cases users decided to move on.
Yeah.
Another one that I always think of is BlackBerry Messenger. That was a huge for a moment in time. Hi. I had several Blackberries and still have fond memories of them, even though I wasn't a business woman in the mid two thousands, I was in high school and of course Microsoft Messenger or MSN Messenger was a huge part of everyone's adolescence and.
Bebo as well.
Why do you think some of these I mean, why don't they stick around?
I think what all these the example show is that platform dominance doesn't always last. Right today we think of these giants and we think, oh, well, they will be there in the future. But yeah, BlackBerry is a great example, Nokia AOL has some really big names at the time. At some point a myths to evolve and grow with the expectations of their users, and I think what the users were afterward then often not so much features, but the whole experience. And in the case of BlackBerry, I
think that may have been one of the reasons. And BlackBerry was also a business tool, so there may have been other reasons as well. In the Skype and MySpace case, it was a lot of private users who basically decided the other platforms had what they needed.
I guess our relationship and growing immediacy as a society has had to contribute to us cycling through this tech quicker, right. I mean I read somewhere this morning that Netflix took three and a half years to reach a million users, while the likes of Threads, which was Instagram's answer to Twitter, I've got two million users in just two hours. That doesn't necessarily mean longevity nowadays, does it?
Though?
No?
I agree sometimes these are dynamic developments, but exactly a longevity relates more to into still also trying to understand what directions could we grow and what do the users want? And I see this as a in a way a co evolution where the platforms try to understand the users, but then the users over time may also adjust the way they're they're using the tools, even just the way they're doing things. So as long as as a platform I can evolve together with the users, then it should work.
But how this evolution goes that's quite hard to predict, and I think there were a lot of smart people at these companies that we discussed that still didn't weren't able to figure out what way the users wanted to grow.
They only gave Google Glass to developers. Initially you could buy them. It was about twelve hundred pounds, and it was only on sale to the developer community, who were the best will in the world. Probably aren't supermodels generally, and so the user imagery was problematic. And that's by the way, going to be a problem with the Apple Vision Pro because the only people who'll use an Apple Vision Pro in public are going to be weirdos.
There are also some things that I think that never really took off at all. I'm thinking like virtual reality hasn't really taken off yet, despite everyone talking about it and trying to make it a thing. So why aren't we all wearing goggles or going to work in a virtual workspace or something.
So when we look at these design prince, we just dead. We discuss I mean, against simplicity. I think is a good one here, because it doesn't seem too simple to use these goggles in some situations. Right, they're too finicky, it takes too long and so on, so the effort is quite high. And on the other side, their value
is not always that clear. And I think indeed there's a couple of examples where technologies never took off or took a long time because the users were just not to sure how to really, yeah, how to use them in the most beneficial ways.
And in other cases it worked.
So yeah, this is in a way relates and again also a bit too well, what do the users, how do they perceive these tools fitting in how they work or how they do things in their daily lives.
And I suppose something might need to be embraced by the business world to become successful, do you know, like BlackBerry messenger?
Yes, I think the case of BlackBerry.
I never had one, but from what I remember is it was it was an ill using having a BlackBerry and all of a sudden having this capability to text from a mobile a bit different from compared to phones before. But then the iPhone, especially in smartphones the other smartphones that then came a bit later, was a major disruption because all of a sudden, there was not just the phone right, there was this device that was so generative
or malible. It could do so many things. And I think what was surprising in the business world at the time was that iPhone originally was rather seen as a private device, but many organizations decided, yeah, okay, our managers can have iPhones too. And I think that I'm not saying that the iPhone alone killed the BlackBerry, but I think it came as a surprise that then many businesses moved on from the BlackBerry to smartphones like the iPhone or and rid phones.
How do you think how relationship and reliance on technology has adapted over time. Has it become a bit of a hindrance or a major help?
I think it is both.
I think there's fantastic cases how these devices make our lives easier. At the same time, the more we integrate them in our lives and in a way depend on them, or fear we depend on them, the more negative effects we also see, and starting with kids and how they use these devices at school, often in really detrimental ways, things that you and I guess didn't experience, but that a lot of young children have to figure out nowadays,
and also as adults. I mean, so from that perspective, I guess it's a balanced views, acknowledging the potential benefits but also being aware of all the potential detrimental effects and especially important for AI that has taken a lot of our private lives and on our business lives by storm in just the last couple of years. And again then the risks that come with this, various biases and problems need to be acknowledged at the same time. And yeah, and we need to react to that as well.
When we're talking about the next big thing, it has to have something to do with AI, right. We at the point where chat GPT has evolved beyond just being a fun trend of making some AI images, sending to your friends, making up a little itinerary. I mean, what's the next step for AI, especially in I guess, both in personal and business life.
Well, I mean, I would say the effects are already really there for many freelancers, for example, in creative spaces is where AI basically has taken over or in other professions. So the question here is really like, how do we We cannot really shut it out, but how can we react to the fact that AI is all of a sudden there and is taking over some tasks and parts
of of of job roles. So I think that this is in some way happened overnight, and and businesses and especially also policymakers around the globe bar having trouble catching catching up in the private life. I guess it's similar to uh to what I said about social media before. I see some co evolution in a way we we change our our practices, our habits to some extent based
on what how AI makes our lives easier. And as as long as it just makes it easier and we don't don't change things in ways that are then depremental to our ourselves or to others, then I think, yeah, we can see the positive effects. But again there's I think what is very important in the space is AI literacy, making informed decisions about AI, being aware of what AI is actually able to do and where we need to be really careful using it, and not being too too
trusting in its capabilities. So from that perspective, in my opinion, what is happening right now is already is a really big thing, and the question is how do we how do we react, Like, how how can we make sure that the ethics that we have, that the values that we have are not going overboard now?
And what about this internet thing?
Do you do you know anything about that?
Sure?
What the hell is that? Exactly?
Well, it's it's become a place where people are publishing information, so everybody can have their own homepage. Companies are there the latest information. It's wild, what's going on? You can send electronic mail to people. It is the big new things.
A couple of months ago, there was like a big breakthrough announcement that on the internet or on some computer deal they were going to broadcast a baseball game. You could listen to a baseball game on your computer. And I just thought to myself, does radio ring a bell?
And how can we make sure that AI, the snowball of it doesn't get away from us kind of like the Internet did. Because I know that there's some legislation there that's still trying to catch up to the World Wide web. So in the.
Business lives, in a way it's a little bit easier because you can establish guard race and policy saying look, you can do this and that's okay, but this is where it ends. This is a boundary look that we're not crossing, and as the leadership of an organization can say that. I mean there's a trade off because some may feel that they're missing out if they're not using
more of the AI capabilities. But I guess it's about managing risks there and I think it's a very valid approach to assess the risk first and not trying to catch up too fast. On a societal level, this is a bit more tricky. I think in a way we learned a little bit from the case of social media, where legislation indeed has taken in many countries forever to actually acknowledge the risks and the dangers of social media
and to catch up with it. I mean, the social media band for children in Australia comes now literally decays after young people have started using it. So in the case of it, I think there's more awareness and there's also louder voices that say, look, we need to we need to implement guardrails, policies, laws also in private life, and and actually also we need to make some of
these guard rails mandatory for the platform providers. I would say policy makers have learned from the past to some extent and try to be quicker with their with their implementations. There As one example, I would like to mention social companions.
So there's various platforms where you can have chat with with avatars literally having virtual relationships with the I and all that, and millions of users actually trust AI quite a lot to an extent where we had global cases in the US in Australia where people took their lives based on advice from a eye. So this is obviously
this has gone way too far. This is where then legislation has step in and say, okay, like we need to make sure that I doesn't give these advices and basically that there models are only wrote out and can be used by the public if they're safe.
Yeah, that's really interesting actually because I read somewhere the other day that people have been flocking to AI and getting mental health advice instead of actually paying the money to go see a psychologist or a counselor, and the waiting lists for those are huge and there I've seen a couple of psychologists on TikTok warning people saying, no, this is not a solution. And I think there needs to be a little bit more, like you said, some literacy around what AI actually is and the advice that
it gives. It is only what you feed it, right.
Yes, yes, I mean I think they are as you say, we have a growing need for mental support, I would say across our societies and not enough psychologists, coaches and so on. And I think AI can help to some extent, but only in a safe space. There have been studies that have shown that it is highly effective, and I have examples also in my network that where experts and psychologists were quite impressed what AI can actually do. But just having a one positive example or a couple of
nice anecdotes doesn't mean it's safe to use. Somebody who potentially uses it needs to be very aware what AI can do and cannot do. But also we need to make sure that the models go only that far.
And finally, what do you think the tech world or the business world as a whole can learn from the downfall of apps like Skype.
I think that many platforms that have been successful over the last years, are very heavily uses centric. They're very close to their users, and they're really understand and what the users want, and they're quick to react. What we can learn is that there's not a lot of tech loyalty, so users will move on if they don't get the experience anymore that they want. So it's really for a platform,
it's really important to understand what the users want. At the same time, like the case of social media, also shows that user interests and platform interests are not always aligned, right. I mean, we know that social media platforms really thrive with highly emotional for example, inflammatory posts and comments, so because they want a high user engagement, they.
Will encourage that.
So here we actually also then need policies and laws making sure that this yard doesn't further increase or it's all contained in a way. So basically that we have really key yeah, competing interests. I think in the long run, it would be good to see more and more platforms taking right decisions, not being after the on the short run, after just the money, but also like after sustainable growth that also is in the interest of the users in terms of yeah, literally mental well being.
Thanks for joining us, Alex.
Thank you, Chelsea.
That's it for this episode of the Front Page. You can read more about today's stories and extensive news coverage at enzidherld dot co dot nz. The Front Page is produced by Ethan Sills and Richard Martin, who is also our sound engineer. I'm Chelsea Daniels. Subscribe to the Front Page on iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts, and tune in tomorrow for another look behind the headlines.