Skype -- the latest offering from the dynamic duo that brought us Kazaa -- is being watched as the latest "disruptive technology," but USA Today's Kevin Maney thinks it may also represent "the most fascinating reinvention of the corporation since Alfred Sloan imagined General Motors in the 1920s." Skype, in case you've never heard of it, provides "a way to make high-quality phone calls over the internet for free." What makes it different from other voice-over-internet offerings, in part, is its quality. It seems that Skype, "on a good broadband connection, can sound like a CD of the incoming caller's voice." The software for Skype, skype.com, is free, and "has been downloaded about 10 million times" since its introduction about a year ago. Skype, as you may know, was invented by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, whom you may remember as the fellows who brought us Kazaa -- the music file-sharing software that "works by using the internet and each user's computer as the infrastructure," using "no central computer, no fiber-optic lines, no 800 number for technical support, nothing." Well, Niklas and Janus figured that the same sort of technology could be used to enable anyone with an internet connection to make a phone call -- but without a telephone or a telephone company. And the music industry thinks it has problems! The truly intriguing thing about all of this, says Kevin, is just like Kazaa, kazaa.com, Skype's "hard assets are little more than a website. It's a phone company with no network, no switchers, no repair guys in trucks. The users, the users' computers and the public internet, do all the work." Not only that, but it costs just "one-tenth of a cent ... for Skype to add a new customer." As Kevin puts it: "Skype is almost like running a cookie company by just sending out recipes." Hm, Laura Shapiro should like that. Anyway, Skype "has barely any staff and has no real headquarters. It has no infrastucture whatsoever but is serving millions in 170 countries and could, with the same lack of insfrastructure, scale that up to billions." It is, mind you, backed to the tune of $9 million by Draper Fisher Jurvetson, the vc's who brought us Hotmail. Others, however, look at Skype and don't see a real business there. But Kevin Maney sees the possibility of something quite different: "As Sloan developed the corporate structure for his century," he concludes, "Skype's house of bits and fog might set the tone for this one." Source: Cool News