Science Quote by Niklas Zennstrom

In a single, almost throwaway line, Zennstrom sketches the real trick behind the early internet communications boom: it wasn’t about inventing a new way to talk, it was about collapsing several previously separate behaviors into one seamless habit. “Also” matters here. It frames voice as just another modular feature, not the crown jewel of telecom. That’s a quiet insult to the old phone companies, whose business models treated voice as sacred, metered, and tightly controlled.

The verb “combine” is doing the strategic work. It signals convergence, but not in the corporate-brochure sense. It’s a user-centered convergence: talk while you type, send a document while you’re mid-call, move from chat to voice without switching platforms or paying a toll. That blending turns communication from a linear event (a call begins, a call ends) into an ambient workflow. The subtext is that the value shifts from the network to the software layer, from the carrier to the interface.

Contextually, Zennstrom’s name points straight to Skype-era thinking, when VoIP wasn’t merely cheaper calling; it was a cultural re-education. People learned to expect communication to be multifunctional, synchronous and asynchronous at once, social and transactional at the same time. “Instant messaging” and “online file sharing” aren’t add-ons; they’re the Trojan horses that make voice sticky, collaborative, and hard to monetize the old way. The sentence reads bland, but its intent is radical: redefine “calling” as a feature inside a broader digital relationship, not a product you buy by the minute.