Microsoft is shutting down Skype. It will go offline in May 2025.
“We’ve learned a lot from Skype over the years that we’ve put into Teams as we’ve evolved teams over the last seven to eight years,” Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, said in an interview with CNBC. “But we felt like now is the time because we can be simpler for the market, for our customer base, and we can deliver more innovation faster just by being focused on Teams.” (CNBC)
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.
Skype, was once a beloved product, one that I loved using every day. It was a product I wrote about long before it was trendy. I sent the team feedback. Like all tiny apps that are good at what they do, it became popular and grew really fast. It was sold to eBay, and then re-sold to Microsoft. And that’s when the magic disappeared. Through series of mergers and managers, Skype became an exact opposite of what I loved about it — independent outsider which was great at — chat, messaging and phone calls. It had just enough features, and its desktop client was minimal in its perfection. Now, as I tweeted in the past, it is “a turd of the highest quality.”
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 In simplest terms, Teams is a perfect encapsulation of a bureaucratic, archaic, and outdated 50-year-old company that is trying to reinvent itself as an AI leader.
More on that another time, but for now, let’s call it what it is. Microsoft bought and effectively killed Skype. I could write a Ph.D. dissertation on this — for now, this is all I have to say. Microsoft didn’t know how to nurture Skype, and its bureaucracy killed one of the most iconic brands of the new century. Skype was the precursor to WhatsApp’s global success. At one point, I even suggested that Facebook should buy Skype.
In one swoop, Facebook would dominate what I’ve maintained is both the new age and classic social networking. They have people’s credit cards; they have their real-world phone information; and in the end, they have a better, more useful, social graph than Facebook itself.
The Skype-Facebook client on the desktop would mean both Facebook and Skype will be jointly in people’s faces, and take time away from other web services, such as Google. A simple search box inside the Skype client, and the two companies are starting to take attention away from arch-nemesis, Google.
It single-handedly destroyed the long-distance calling business. Most young people today don’t remember, but long-distance calls used to cost a lot of money. Especially for immigrants, calling home used to cost a fortune. Skype made it free. Skype co-founder and Atomico chief Niklas Zennstrom told FT:
“Skype was a revolutionary product of its time and I will always be proud and grateful for the early team members and investors who took a chance on us. Now other firms are innovating in this space to offer new services for a whole new generation, many of whom will have no idea of how expensive it used to be to call Australia.”
Skype was the original gangsta of “network effects.” But it was more than just that. Like the original iPod, Skype was an early harbinger of technology as culture. To illustrate this point, here is a small sample of what Skype meant to society, which should help readers understand how powerful the brand has been.
- In the 2010 movie, The Social Network, Zuckerberg’s character is on a Skype call.
- In 2012, in Skyfall, villain Raoul Silva uses Skype-like video calls to plot nefarious activities.
- In The Office (U.S.) – Jim and Pam rely on Skype for their long-distance relationship.
- In Breaking Bad, Walter White’s lawyer, Saul Goodman, often uses Skype for secretive communications.
- In Parks and Recreation, Ben Wyatt uses Skype to communicate with Leslie while working in Washington, D.C.
Skype’s demise is a good lesson in how ineffective middle management can destroy good acquisitions. I have never met a Skype manager on Microsoft’s side who had any imagination. Most were such “drones” that next to them even a red clay brick would come across as a genius work of art.
I wonder how Skype would have fared under the new Satya Nadella regime. One of the truly iconic digital brands, it had enough data for them to train their audio and video AI models. Look at what Facebook does with WhatsApp.
Skype was a great early introduction to distributed internet, one that was free from the legacy of client-server models that dominated the world at that time. In a way, Skype was what Web3 wants to be — a large, massive network loosely coupled.
For me, Skype was a great story. I covered it extensively. As I wrote on this website a long time ago, it was the story of a lifetime. I was on the story of its first deal when it was bought by eBay. I covered it as a startup. I broke the story when Microsoft bought it. This has been one of my favorite startups to write about. Plus, it allowed me to have some good times the founders, build memories, and make so many friends along the way.
If you want to know what happened to Skype, here is a great little documentary CNBC did a couple of years ago. It is a trip down memory lane but accurately sums up how this brand died.
