I never really said it's a rule. It's the way I think it generally needs to be done. Obviously, there are exceptions.
Skype did not evolve in a vacuum. It piggybacked off the phone system. "Make calls for cheap" - which is a direct call to utility.
Remember that any system that gets its users laid or makes them money can have the users jump through hoops to use it. Anything less than that has to have increasingly more finesse.
I'm going to paraphrase, so I apologise in advance.
Remember that any system that gets its users laid or makes them money can have the users jump through hoops to use it. Anything less than that has to have increasingly more finesse.
Could I distil this to: "Skype got away with not having this because.."?
BTW, I'm not saying that creating something that is useful without a network is bad. It's good. I'm just saying that in many cases it's very hard. Say skype had gone down this path. They may have failed to find some way (eg phone book) of making it useful to just one person.
Forcing the approach seems like unnecessarily inserting a another binary hurdle.
On the other hand, the slightly less elegant approach of getting your small number of users that want to save on phone bills to nag their friends seems more suitable. The existing users have in-built incentive to do this. It's pretty much guaranteed to produce some results.
Iirc, Skype offered cheap international phone calls (to POTS phone numbers) at the same time as skype-to-skype calls... so they were indeed useful even in isolation.
Skype did not evolve in a vacuum. It piggybacked off the phone system. "Make calls for cheap" - which is a direct call to utility.
Remember that any system that gets its users laid or makes them money can have the users jump through hoops to use it. Anything less than that has to have increasingly more finesse.