Exploring Cognition Change of Skype Usage

With the exponential growth of the Internet usage, Internet applications are widespread enormously across almost every field, but very few of them actually survive in the market. Among them, the Internet phone service, which has been available since 1995, has fast advanced in terms of offering new value-added services and acquiring an impressive increase in the number of users from all over the world. The main purposes of this study are twofold. First, we investigated why certain products subsist while various substitutes exist in the same field. Second, a qualitative approach was applied to explore the consumer behaviors of Skype Internet phone and compare the schema changes between Skype users and non-skype users during the same period. Concluding from the results of qualitative study, the cognition of Skype usage has quickly changed people in psychological, social, marketing mix and situational influences. In conjunction with the encouraging results, the model of this paper is not only suitable for Internet applications but also can be extended to survey diverse products in different areas.