In a crafty piece of marketing yesterday, Skype actually announced that they were raising their prices (yes, indeed!), while positioning this new pricing plan as disruptive.Â
- They’ve rolled out a new SkypePro plan, which allows unlimited local calling, and includes Skype VoiceMail.  You used to pay 15 euros annually for Skype VoiceMail, and most people use Skype for long distance calling. SkypePro is 2 euros per month.Â
- They’ve introduced a new “connection fee” at the beginning of every call to the PSTN. Common in the prepaid phone card industry, this 3.9 eurocent fee guarantees a (small) minimum revenue for every call, even those very short calls that end in voice mail.Â
Madame Meg must be putting some pressure on Niklas and his team to make a contribution to the bottom line.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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I think it's more a case of Niklas, back to being a more proactive CEO, is putting on pressure to increase revenue to make the benchmarks required for their $1.5B bonus negotiated into the original eBay acquisition deal.
And they'll keep rolling up prices until people realize they have other, better VoIP options. OneSuite does just as good a job with VoIP as it does with calling card accounts — and without any connection fees, either.
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