Decentralised comms is where it’s at
As Microsoft doubles down on efforts to kill Skype persuade users to chat with Teams, former Skype developer Jaan Tallinn has dropped some cash into the latest funding round for open-source IM client Element. Element, which provides a messaging app for and contributes development to the open communication protocol Matrix, has raised $30m in Series B funding from investors such as Protocol Labs and Metaplanet, the latter being a fund set up by Tallinn. Tallinn, also partly responsible for the file-sharing app Kazaa, sold his shares in Skype when it was snapped up by eBay in 2005 for $2.6bn. eBay sold Skype in 2009 to an investment group which then flogged the messaging platform to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5bn. « Me and messaging go back a long way, » Tallinn told The Register, « I’m very partial to IM and… neutral platforms. » Tallinn also spoke of the original peer to peer nature of Skype, the implementation of which didn’t lend itself too well to devices such as mobile phones, and gave Microsoft credit for taking a centralised approach. « I do think it was a correct engineering decision for Microsoft, » he said. However, « I think the future of the communications kind of has to be peer to peer. » Ten years on, Microsoft would rather like its users to consider Teams as their primary chat app. It has, however, also committed to support Skype for a few more years (and doubtless further enrage users with more user interface tweaks).
