For those who cannot get enough of the intrigue, scheming, and shenanigans surrounding the boardroom-to-courtroom-to-boardoom battle for the ownership of Skype, Brad Reese at Network World reproduces a medley of Michael Volpi’s greatest email hits.
Thrill to Volpi’s message about “getting the father of SIP to jump ship” from Cisco. Enjoy his follow-up message to Egon Durban, managing director at private-equity firm Silver Lake, regarding the need to fill out a SIP engineering team with five or six solid VoIP software engineers. Marvel at Volpi’s disparagement of former colleagues and Skype-deal confederates.
Moreover, consider that he was writing all these email hits while still employed as the CEO of a company (Joost) that was founded and run by the same duo, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, who founded Skype before selling it to eBay and who entertained hopes of owning it again. Also ponder that much of the same underlying p2p software used at Joost, at least originally, also served as the architectural foundation for Skype.
Finally, consider that Volpi was said to have led and been involved in an architectural transition at Joost that saw the video-sharing site move from the p2p foundations on which it was based — using the same Joltid technology that was licensed by Skype — to a client-server architecture that employed Flash-based web clients at the end points.
At minimum, there would appear to be superficial similarities between the architectural overhaul that had occurred at Joost and what Volpi proposed for Skype.
Twilight in the Valley of the Nerds 