Completely agree, this author apparently, potentially, lives in a sort of cloud society where every designer is paid handsomely for his work and you don't have

Completely agree, this author apparently, potentially, lives in a sort of cloud society where every designer is paid handsomely for his work and you don't have to scrape and beg and plead and bleed and tactically position yourself in order to make it. A winning Skype redesign would be life-changing for anybody with the time to submit to such a contest, by definition.