RIP Skype (2003–2025), survived by multiple versions of Microsoft Teams

Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011, and now its journey is over.

Today is the day: Microsoft has formally shuttered the Skype app and service after announcing in February that Skype was being axed in favor of Microsoft Teams, the company's Slack competitor.

The Skype apps have all been advertising the end of the service and pointing users to Teams for weeks now. As of today, if you open the app or navigate to the Skype site, you'll be directed to use Teams instead. The last active vestige of Skype is the Skype Dial Pad, which Skype subscribers and members with Skype Credits can still use to make calls to traditional telephone numbers (the Dial Pad is also incorporated into Microsoft Teams Free).

It's an unceremonious end for an app that was once synonymous with video calls. Microsoft originally bought Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011; it was also owned by eBay from 2005 to 2009 and by a group of venture capital firms between 2009 and 2011. Ironically, Microsoft bought the app to replace its own first-party communication client at the time, Windows Live Messenger (which itself had grown out of the old MSN Messenger).

Though not the first software to allow video communication over the Internet, Skype was one of the first recognizably modern peer-to-peer video chatting apps. Created by some of the same developers behind the Kazaa peer-to-peer file-sharing software, Skype was originally released in 2003, at around the same time when increasing broadband Internet availability and better video compression codecs were solving the bandwidth problem.

But as detailed by Wired, Skype lost momentum after the Microsoft purchase, partly due to a redesign that people didn't like and partly because upstarts like Zoom were offering new features and better call quality. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020 and all kinds of office jobs shifted to remote work, it was Zoom and not Skype that was in a better position to become the video-chatting app everyone was trapped in.

Skype has been merging into or being replaced by Teams for years, starting with the end of Skype for Business in 2017, a few months after formally releasing the first version of Teams. Microsoft has pushed Teams aggressively, including it alongside its flagship Office apps and Microsoft 365 service for years. Some regulators believed this was, in fact, too aggressive, and Microsoft decoupled Teams from the other Office apps in 2023 (for the European Union) and 2024 (for everyone else).

Source

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