Skype will make its final call on May 5 as Microsoft retires the iconic two-decade-old service that revolutionized global communication.
The move to shut down Skype will allow Microsoft to concentrate on its own Teams platform, streamlining its communication services, the tech giant announced on Friday, reports The Guardian.
Founded in 2003, Skype quickly revolutionized the landline industry in the early 2000s with its audio and video calling features, becoming a household name with hundreds of millions of users at its peak.
However, in recent years, the platform has struggled to keep up with more user-friendly and reliable competitors like Zoom and Salesforce’s Slack, partly due to its technology becoming less compatible with the smartphone era.
When the pandemic and remote work increased the demand for online business calls, Microsoft pushed for Teams by aggressively integrating it with other Office apps to target corporate users, a group that was once Skype's core audience.
Online video communication was once the near exclusive purview of Skype before the likes of FaceTime, Zoom and Google Hangouts took over. Skype was an early example of a tech product that was so ubiquitous it was used as a verb. Users would “Skype” someone in much the same way they would Google something.
When Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5bn after outbidding Google and Facebook, its largest deal at the time, the service had about 150 million monthly users; by 2020, that number had fallen to roughly 23 million, despite a brief resurgence during the pandemic.
Over the years, Microsoft struggled to integrate Skype into its suite of tools and could not meet the moment when the company began seeing competition from Apple’s FaceTime and Google’s various communications app attempts. And when Microsoft launched its collaboration product Teams in 2017 that quickly took priority.
“We are honored to have been part of the journey,” Microsoft said on Friday. “Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications.”
To ease the transition from the platform, its users will be able to log into Teams for free on any supported device using their existing credentials, with chats and contacts migrating automatically.
Skype’s shutdown may surprise some, given Microsoft’s years of deprioritizing the platform. It now joins the graveyard of communication tools like Duo and AOL Instant Messenger. Microsoft didn’t share Skype’s current user numbers but stated that Teams has 320 million monthly active users and that no job cuts will occur due to the move.
Bd-pratidin English/ Afia
