To compete in the upcoming voice wars, Skype must have as many active customers as possible. It must fuel its growth in revenue terms too. Hardware helps with both.

First, most users won't use Skype without extra hardware. The minimum of earbuds and a microphone works for the occasional user, but many people want to "pick up the phone" when they hear it ring. Others need headsets to sit at the phone. And others need gear to keep Skype running even when their PC is off. Hardware helps Skype extend its reach and boost per-customer usage.

The current hardware offerings are mostly brain dead, not creating a complete Skype experience. This is OK: it is early. As more competitors enter this space, software will make the gear smarter, adaptable, and better blended with our many communication styles. We're already seeing this in Creative's embedded Skype, in YapperNut's Amy software making their YapperMouse phone smarter, and in ActionTec's VoSKY Exchange plugging Skype into your SMB-sized phone system.

That brings us to money. Skype gets abouts 5 percent of the wholesale price on Skype Certified gear, which Skype eagerly co-markets. On Wednesday we'll hear eBay report their financials for Q4-2005 and for the year. Folks have been guessing revenue from Skype about $60 million for the year. How much can hardware fees contribute in 2006 to a hoped-for $200 million? Let's pull out our handy numsum calculator:

Let's say they want to make $50 million in license revenue this year. They get 5% of products that wholesale for a weighted average (pulled out of thin air) around $20 (I'm thinking $35-45 headsets). To make that number, they must sell one unit to nearly every Skype user on earth, pulling $1 billion at wholesale ($1.5-2 billion retail?) through distribution channels. Tough? Impossible?

What can you change? Boosting the user base, establishing a recognized consumer brand, and getting retail shelf space makes it possible to move gear; all of these will cost money. Some users will buy more than one item a year for multiple Skype contexts: work/home, friends/family, fashion/function. Businesses will buy gear for the workplace at wholesale prices in thousands of dollars per site and for many employees (think call centers) although the distribution channel is more likely ICT/VAR/System Integrator than store front.

Skype Certification revenue, while growing and important, won't dominate Skype's 2006 financials. What will?

Skype has an online survey up. It's all about habits and practices - but there seems to have been little thinking on and stretch in terms of options, scales, wants and wishlists. It's not well designed, poorly structured, with many gaps in areas covered, and no real behavioural information being collected. A wasted opportunity!

Just because online surveys are simple doesn't mean they shouldn't be well thought out. It's also more dangerous to have information that is incomplete or poorly collected than to have no information at all. Unfortunately many organisations fall into this trap. There is down and dirty research -- this is not it.

Breaking down the survey to understand the gaps further, there are problems in several areas :

1. Areas of Coverage :

* No demographic profiling - age, gender, income, etc - to contextualise responses

* Inadequate coverage of Skype's offerings - what about conference calling, chat and multi-chat, Skype on PDA's, Skype API, forums - areas of satisfaction and problems with them? For instance, how many have made a conference call with SkypeOut - one problem could be tackling DTMF tones

* No behavioural information of depth and value like buddy lists, minutes and hours spent on each feature, how many failed calls, what percentage is acceptable, what percentage local vs international calls, whether Skype is set to a call-centric or chat-centric mode, etc

* No developer products included : video chat, presence servers, outlook import, other plugins. These form a vital part of the total offering from a customer's point of view, and make the Skype experience richer - it would have been interesting to study awareness, usage and motivations for them.

* No feature comparisons with other products competing in the same space from a user's perspective - IM, other VOIP offerings, even landlines and cell phones - resulting in answers in a vacuum without benchmarks and best-in-class standards that always make responses so much more reliable and meaningful, particularly when satisfaction is involved. For instance, would you say your Skype billing experience is better than or worse than your current cellular provider? Landline carrier? Amazon? Other? NA? What's your best billing experience online?

* Very little space offered for opportunities to improve

* Even less on what Skype really means to users today and how is it changing the way they communicate, impact on their communication behaviour and habits.

* Branding and positioning issues - how is Skype positioned in the customer's mind? What associations, what image, what relationship, strength of stickiness and loyalty? I know Skype is beginning to think of brand - and that's a great step. I also hope that they remember the brand is not just what the company communicates, but as it rests in user's minds and hearts and leaves it imprints. I'd have loved to see some brand-related questions here.

2. Questionnaire design and structure:

* Options and choices (dropdown boxes) provided seem inadequate in most areas. The connection speed options are not customer friendly. Reasons for using don't include - for business, for travel, for connecting with family abroad etc. Another instance:

Why did you start using Skype Voicemail? (check all that apply)

Thought it was cool

Wanted to save money

Wanted to call people abroad

Other

These options make little sense in the context of voicemail - none of the potential reasons for using Voicemail are listed in the options. It seems like these questions have been dumped blindly from the earlier SkypeOut section.

* Areas for improvement in all sections are left as an open-ended space; some amount of stimulus for thought might have been provided for generating more meaningful suggestions. For instance, for Voicemail, there are so many possiblities - from saving copies to sending group messages or not having to listen to your message for the 5th time when sending.

* Scale used for satisfaction - the 3-point scale : very satisfied-satisfied-not satisfied again doesn't really offer up much - first, there aren't enough gradations to really determine satisfaction to make it a good customer service scale and second, satisfaction must always be measured against perceived benchmarks, without which it can be meaningless.