And the VCR did the same thing: the movie industry thought nobody would ever watch movies any more.

Skype is easy enough to use so that people don't need to be tech savvy - a lot of users just want to communicate with their friends and family, and they find this is the easiest, cheapest way.

We have just started, and if you compare the number of people using Skype to the number using a telephone network around the world, we're still just starting.

The thing about the Internet is the openness. People can link to each other themselves.

With our work at Kazaa, we began seeing growing broadband connections and more powerful computers and more streaming multimedia, and we saw that the traditional way of communicating by phone no longer made a lot of sense.

Another differentiator is that Skype is free and simple to set up, and it costs us virtually nothing for a new user to join the Skype network, which is why we can offer the service for free.

Skype is for any individual who has a broadband Internet connection.