At first I really thought it was just me, but I’ve confirmed that my Macbook’s performance suffers significantly when Skype is running, even if it’s just sitting in the background. Many people have complained about this in the past but I wondered how much of the supposed performance degradations were reality versus FUD or old wives’ tales. So I’ve removed Skype from my startup items.
Performance isn’t the only reason, though. Gizmo does just about everything I need from Skype anyway, and a few things it doesn’t (hold music, free custom voicemail, etc.). Plus, very few of the contacts I rely on Skype for daily aren’t also in my Gizmo Project contact list. Plus, Gizmo really provides a value add by being a call target for Grand Central and by allowing my to place SIP-to-PSTN calls on my Gizmo account via a Nokia IP-enabled cell phone. There ya have it. Skype–Hasta la vista, baby.
I wrote about SIP and the future of telephony just the other day on my website. I suspect this is going to be a move you won’t regret. By joining the SIP community, you are opening yourself up to a far larger telephony community than before, and one that is based on open standards. Skype is great… ocasionally. When it doesn’t suck by being proprietary, it’ll suck by being badly written.
I totally agree. I experienced the same problem on my MacBook hence I stopped using Skype (I use it just for IM with some contacts).
[...] The latest comes from Ted Wallingford who says he is dropping Skype because it slows his Macbook down too much. I think the following is even more significant [...]