New Delhi Times - Gaurav Bhatnagar reporting from New Delhi, India

Bernard Moon as a very interesting post on what motivated the VCs to fund Skype (which has of course given them mind boggling ROI). In particular the following lines exactly echo what I had written a few days back

What really seems to have sold them, however, was the ease and reliability of Skype's software, which they initially tried out in beta. Specifically, this was one of those rare pieces of software that Stavis and a far-flung colleague could download at the same time and be using five minutes later. No firewall issues, no "this doesn't work on my PC" problems. It may sound basic, but think about all the times you and a colleague have tried to download a piece of software (particularly communications software), only to find out that it works far better on his computer better than on yours.

"Regardless of the firewall, it would traverse the network and find the connection," Stavis explains. "And then it worked 100 times better than anything else we had seen."

Now the sales and marketing folks can't stop telling us techies that its not what you are selling, its how you are selling that matters. Well, take that! Here is a piece of software that stood on its own - sheer raw power of the code. No gimmicks, no fancy advertising, no $100 million marketing budgets. Pure technology. I think we will see more and more of that in the coming days. Because the web is opening up, it is no longer the playground for just the Yahoos, Googles and Microsofts of the world. No amount of marketing or sales will be able to make up for bad code. In the end, better technology will prevail!