internet - Skype international

(a contribution to tidbits at the Poynter institute, I submitted just now)

For months I have been wondering why my favorite VOIP-provider Skype teamed up with tom.com, one of many subsidiaries of Hong Kong tycoon Li kai-Shing. The deal, signed in October last year, triggered off a marketing campaign that really seemed not needed.
Long before tom.com came into the picture groups of giggling female students from Guangzhou or flirting women from Beijing would call me over Skype to practice their English or improve their vocabulary on specific subjects. The number of Chinese users of Skype was rather impressive from the very early start.
But for months after Skype and tom.com signed the deal, the subway in Shanghai was plastered with adds for an international VOIP service that seemed to be selling already very well without any marketing effort. Why would an internet service, global by nature, team up with local player?
Today I was invited to download the official edition of Skype, after they left their beta-status and discovered a few abnormalities. While the service was working perfectly, I was initially unable to ‘share’ my experience with others. Only by using a proxy and making sure I had signed off under my own user name, I could invite other to use the same service.
Other services have paved this way for international companies to enter the market in China. Yahoo’s China edition is limited compared to the British one I use, and QQ even added their key-word filtering system to the users’ computers. Most Chinese users will react in the same way I did, by not trusting the Chinese edition and downloading the international ones.