Science & Tech Quote by Niklas Zennstrom

The line lands like a time capsule from the mid-2000s, when “wireless” still sounded like a frontier rather than plumbing. Zennstrom isn’t selling Skype as software so much as declaring it inevitable infrastructure: people will “need” it, “no matter where they are.” That phrasing quietly flips a convenience into a baseline expectation, the kind of rhetorical move tech founders use to turn a product into a presumed human requirement. It’s not just about calls; it’s about normalizing constant reachability.

The subtext is a bet on a particular future of the internet: ubiquitous access plus voice as data. By tethering Skype’s destiny to “the rollout of Internet everywhere,” Zennstrom frames connectivity as an external tide and Skype as the craft that knows how to ride it. “Taking advantage” is candidly opportunistic: the company doesn’t need to build the network, just surf the capital-heavy work of carriers, municipalities, and standards bodies.

Naming WiFi and WiMax does cultural work, too. WiFi evokes the messy, consumer-driven present; WiMax, at the time, represented an almost utopian promise of metropolitan-scale broadband that would bypass traditional telecom gatekeepers. Invoking both signals a strategy of being format-agnostic while still sounding technically visionary.

Read now, it also hints at the coming bargain: seamless communication in exchange for always-on dependency. “No matter where they are” is empowerment and surveillance-adjacent expectation in the same breath. Skype’s pitch wasn’t merely mobility; it was the social rewiring that mobility makes possible.