Microsoft Shutting Down Skype
Tom Warren (9to5Mac, Hacker News, Slashdot):
Microsoft is shutting down Skype in May and replacing it with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers. Existing Skype users will be able to log in to the Microsoft Teams app and have their message history, group chats, and contacts all automatically available without having to create another account, or they can choose to export their data instead. Microsoft is also phasing out support for calling domestic or international numbers.
From my perspective, that was the most useful part of Skype.
Skype first launched in 2003 and was a very popular VOIP messaging platform in its heyday.
But there was a time when Skype was a revolution: free, good sounding voice calls across the Internet. Not to mention the ability to make cheap actual phone calls internationally, in a day and age when that was usually ridiculously expensive.
Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion in what was then its largest-ever acquisition. At its peak, Skype had more than 300 million monthly active users and was synonymous with internet-based voice and video calling. The service steadily declined in relevance in recent years, with its active user base shrinking to approximately 36 million by 2023 as competitors such as Zoom, WhatsApp, and Microsoft’s own Teams platform gained traction.
Teams has since grown to 320 million monthly users, far surpassing Skype’s remaining user base. The company’s decision to discontinue Skype is apparently part of a broader effort to prioritize artificial intelligence features within Teams.
Skype was a victim of Microsoft’s focus on Windows to the detriment of every other platform and a culture of mismanaging acquisitions under Steve Ballmer.
It was a great product in its heyday but that hasn’t been the case in over a decade.
The best part of Skype (RIP) was Ecamm’s Call Recorder plugin (also RIP) that was not only good for podcasting for YEARS but was a great way to record your phone calls if you used a Skype-out number. When I was a journalist, it was so useful.
It makes me incredibly sad, but I am not surprised. The writing was on the wall. Skype has been dying a slow death for a long time. As far back as 2018, it was obvious what lay in store. At the time, I wrote about the great Skype vanishing.
[…]
Microsoft now talks about Teams being their focus, showing that even today they haven’t realized what made Skype a cultural, consumer force. Microsoft Teams is a terrible product — and I dread using it. In simplest terms, Teams is a perfect encapsulation of a bureaucratic, archaic, and outdated 50-year-old company that is trying to reinvent itself as an AI leader.
Previously:
- Skype Credit Is No Longer Available
- EU Charges Microsoft for Bundling Teams and Office
- Call Recorder Succumbs to Apple Silicon
- Microsoft’s Sweet Skype Solution
Update (2025-03-03): Adam Engst:
Microsoft wants Skype users to transition to Microsoft Teams, but it remains unclear if Teams will fulfill all the functions for which people used Skype, such as calling landlines and cell phones from an app. If you’re still using Skype, how do you plan to replace it?
The writing has been on the wall for a long time that Skype was no longer strategic for Microsoft. Really, even right after the acquisition, it never seemed Microsoft had any sort of plan for what to do with Skype — even though, at the time, it was their largest-ever acquisition.
But man, for a long while, Skype was singularly amazing, offering high-quality / low-latency audio calls at a time when everything else seemed low-quality / high-latency.
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Another example of corporate/governmental enshitification... Skype was a wonderful new thing, when it was young, with P2P using supernodes so highly decentralized. Then a behemoth bought it, squeezed it to death, and now it's dead. Instead we have Zoom, which is far more centralized, and therefore easier to surveil.
Skype was an amazing product from the beginning and all the way to version 4.x. They had direct chat, group chat, calls, group calls, file transfers, screen sharing, call-in phone numbers in many countries, calls to numbers for people without internet, etc.
Then some morons at Microsoft started proactively ruining it. With every version, they would remove useful capabilities and add something that no one asked for, which got in the way of using Skype as Skype. For example, they removed the option to open two chats at the same time—something that was easy before with two side-by-side windows—but introduced a social-media-like timeline for spammers.
Then there was a period of near complete neglect, when they did not keep up with OS compatibility and things would just fail because of that.
After that came another wave of changes making it more like all other products at once, but failing miserably at all of them. They totally missed all the opportunities during COVID and the remote work boom, purely out of total incompetence, mismanagement, and neglect.
But despite all that, they still had tens of millions of users, though that number was way down, of course. And now they suggest switching to this horrible Teams crap, which doesn’t even have basic functions—for example, Teams does not support drag-and-drop images in chat.
What a software horror show.
Congrats to Microsoft on another blown lead in a booming marketplace. Skype was years ahead of the pack when they bought and doomed it. No one wants to use Teams. It’s trash.
I told of a friend of mine, "Hey guess what, Microsoft is shutting down Skype—" and he began to cackle in delight, happy to see it finally properly die after years of languishing and being shitty.
...And then once he calmed down, I finally finished with "...and they're replacing it with Microsoft Teams!" and suddenly his mood turned much more sober, and we both acknowledged that he should've waited for me to finish before celebrating.
