People used phones for long distance calls. Skype offered the same capability, but for free.

People used tv to watch their favorite shows. Joost offered online video, but did not include their favorite shows.

Skype made something people want. Joost didn't.

back in 2008 I wrote a post [1] about the (then new) change between desktop app and a browser plugin-based experience. Honestly, I don't think they ever nailed the right mix of great content and flawless user experience.

Eventually all our TV-watching will be done online - it'll just by through a different service. Hulu seems to be well positioned, but only time will tell.

[1] http://blog.webreakstuff.com/2008/09/joost-on-the-browser/

Exactly, skype provided a service that does not rely on content.

They are two very different products and I don't really see the benefit in comparing them, unless of course the question is, why did Nicklas and Janus get Skype (and Kazaar semi) right but joost wrong.

The reason why Skype worked is because it took something that we all needed and wanted and made it fairly simple and attractive. The use of the IM metaphor was the right choice and it pretty successfully manage to stay in the background without interfering unless it was in use. It was an addendum to other tools. You could still use skype even when you weren't using it actively. It also was impossible for telcos of course to touch really touch it once they realized what was going to happen to them.

Joost on the other hand required you to stop everything you where doing in order to use it fully. It couldn't work in the background as the whole idea was "grouphug" tv. Second of all it didn't manage to get proper content.

In my mind the question should be. Why did Hulu succeed and Joost fail. And to that the answer is rather simple. Content.

But I do believe Hulu would have been much less successful if they had taken the application approach. They didn't and instead managed to slowly build up joost as it should have been one natural step at a time.

All I remember about an early Joost was the bizarre, grossly non-native GUI that was enough to make me bin the app after a few days.

Snap, I thought Joost's GUI was like an SDL (Simple Directmedia Layer) experiment gone horribly wrong. It was verging on Gibson cyberspace, but more likely, a kind of useless Minority Report interface.

I think you hit the problem on the head. Skype thrived on its simple user experience, while Joost's overcomplicated and kludgy UX killed it.

I can't remember how early on I tried it, but on my Mac it was incredibly unstable.

I believe the author makes several interesting points about the aspects of Joost's business model and corporate culture that might of lead to its failure, however, one aspect not touched on is the user experience of the product itself.

When compared against its main rival Hulu (as in this post http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/10_reasons_why_joost_fa...) it becomes clear why Joost's user experience also encumbered its own success.

It seems like they're comparing apples and oranges here...

The success and failure or Skype and Joost isn't as cut and dry as the author would like to think. There were a lot of rights and wrongs for both companies and also some luck involved with Skype being successful.

I haven't thought of Joost in a while. What I recall: lack of content, and a clunky user-interface that gobbled far too many resources.