What Happened To Skype
At its height, Skype - a telecommunications app founded by Scandinavian entrepreneurs Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, and Estonian engineers Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn and Toivo Annus - had 560 million registered users. In 2005, just two years after its launch, the app was acquired by eBay. Later, a majority stake was sold to private equity firm Silver Lake. Microsoft then acquired Skype in 2011 for $8.5 billion. While it was revolutionary in its time, Skype’s journey has been full of ups and downs. Now that Microsoft has rival Teams, the future of Skype is uncertain. CNBC explores the company’s past, present and what’s next for the company.
Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
01:09 The early days
06:38 Microsoft era
11:36 What’s left for Skype
Produced and Edited by: Sydney Boyo
Additional Reporting: Jordan Novet
Additional Camera: Kaspar Pokk and Virgo Pärn
Animation: Christina Locopo
Supervising Producer: Jeniece Pettitt
Post Production Support: Tala Hadavi
Additional Footage: Getty Images, Jaan Tallinn, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Ambient Sound Investments, Starship Technologies, LinkedIn
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What Happened To Skype
“Microsoft is where consumer brands go to die.” 😬
It's about time they bought Zoom and turned it into Zune.
remember the Microsoft Zune players? they were wonderful, but died a quick death. The same goes for the Windows Phone Operating system. It was great but Microsoft killed it.
Do you mean google?
Nokia 😢😢
@@nyctenor I had one. Not bad. It just launched far too late and just about when smartphones were really getting going. The iPod had a huge lead (I have the iPod 60 GB Classic - it still works after all these years!). Microsoft did not seem to seriously try to sell it. Like often with Microsoft, they come in late, try to copy someone else's stuff, and fail.
The problem with Skype is that Microsoft was trying to make it more like social media instead of trying to improve on something that was already good that's why zoom took over
They did? What do you mean social media like? I don't see any signs for that? I could be blind tho xD.
Zoom is now back to the ground. Teams is the new king which is made of many Skype IPs n codes.
@@angryhooman3154 Correct. But to be honest, I hate Zoom xD.
How is Skype like social media? It's still mainly designed for one-to-one or small group conversations. There's no liking, sharing & commenting of posts. Are you sure you aren't referring to Discord communities, or Telegram's supergroups & channels instead?
Teams is for corporate. Zoom is still better for videoconference
Met my girlfriend in 2010. She was American and I was English. Without Skype we would not be here today, married with four kids, living a good life in Virginia. Thank you, Skype.
"good life" "Virginia" pick one buddy
@@VEVOJavierc’mon, he didn’t say Florida or Texas 😂
Tf is English supposed to mean, like, can I consider myself as English since I can also speak it?
@@pooppoop3851 maybe he is from england?
@@pooppoop3851I’m going to assume you’re a kid from your username, so I’ll ignore the rudeness and just say that in this context it generally means a person from England.
I used to be a loyal Skype user for years, but after Microsoft purchased it, the simplicity and ease of use that I loved about the platform seemed to fade away. It became increasingly complicated with every update. Suddenly, I found myself being asked to log in not only with my Skype credentials but also my Microsoft ID, adding an unnecessary layer of complexity to a once straightforward platform. It felt like the user experience had been sacrificed in favor of integration with Microsoft services, and that didn't sit well with me.
Microsoft took a great, easy-to-use UI and made it atrocious. It's like they had amateurs doing the UX. Like one of the interviewees said: "Microsoft is where consumer brands go to die."
So true. MS really made it worse.
agree
You nailed it. I'm Gen x. I was there from the late early days of the Internet and www. Did VoIP calls back in 1999. Skype was a new simpler way. Thus embraced. Microsoft ruined it.
Yeah it’s funny. They had MSN Messenger and Skype and mashed them together to get something much worse than both. Amazing really.
Skype literally was an era of my life that I’ll never forget. But I agree, Skype should have rebranded and I think it would have been so ahead of it’s time more than it already was.
Poeple dont understand that Teams is literally just a reskinned version of Skype. I work for Microsoft and under the hood, Teams is using Skype to work. Just with a lot more features since its more business orientated
@@jorgeavelar98 Since you work for MS, can you tell me why the Skype interface in Windows is so convoluted and why the customized greeting feature was taken away from paid customers?
As opposed to figuratively being an era?
In Skype it's a pain to simply save a contact, it's absurd
@@jorgeavelar98 Your boss was Jeff Epstein's lap dog! There is a REASON his wife left him!
After Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011, the integration process faced challenges. Some users experienced difficulties transitioning from the standalone Skype platform to the Microsoft ecosystem, causing frustration and leading to a loss of users.
Teams is a steaming pile of shyte.
Yes, you are right!
Main thing was that it went from peer to peer to server infrastructure. It just destroyed the system cause Microsoft was just saving all your private data, and using it for whatever. You just can't use service like that with sensitive customer data.
yeah, skype standalone was peer to peer and you could transfer arbitrary amounts of data between users. a month after microsoft bought them, data transfers got capped at 50Mb. Ridiculous.
I was a Skype user but when MS bought it was locked out of my account, after a few attempts to reactivate it I was put through circles in the security process so I walked away. MS ruined it.
I think this video missed the main reason Skype was so revolutionary. There were other VOIP apps back then, but the sound quality and the lag made conversations virtually impossible, and adding video was a suicide mission. The CODEC Skype used was super efficient and suddenly everything changed overnight. Low latency and great sound quality. That's what blew everyone away at the time. Having a friendly, simple interface helped also, of course. Even very untechnical or older people could use it easily, and I'll bet a lot of the remaining users today are relatively older, compared to other apps.
Not, that's not it. Skype's codecs weren't too great when it came out compared to what was already available in standard VoIP protocols of that era. What really made Skype stand out was that it could be "encapsulated over HTTP" making it "less fussy" with regards to firewalls and NAT which afflicted SIP-based VoIP solutions (and still do to some extent). It just worked no matter what. You could simply pick up your phone or open up the app on your computer and start a VoIP phone call with anyone over the Internet FOR FREE without having to follow complicated procedures to poke holes in your firewall or beg the network admins to do it for you. That is common place today but it was unheard of and truly groundbreaking at the time!
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 I had forgotten how persistent it was connectivity-wise. In some offices I worked in, it was the only IM app that worked at all, and yes, that also went some way to making it easy to use for less technical people. Still, when it came out, nothing sounded as good as Skype in my experience, and my long-distance GF at the time and I tied everything. ICQ, MSN, Yahoo, Xfire, Odigo, Even Netmeeting (took me a while to recall that name) :) Nothing worked for us as well, or was as stable. I think the P2P aspect of it that borrowed Bitorrent architecture and turned the entire network into a peer to peer exchange that routed data (other people's calls) through your connection whenever Skype was running, allegedly. That was one of the main reasons many network admins banned it at the time and tried - unsuccessfully - to block it, but it always seemed to get through.
I think quality was bad before Microsoft. I had some interviews over Skype. Idea was not bad.
@@RogerioPereiradaSilva77 yup. When we did not have smart phones yet, we used to chat on various IM clients. At home on our laptop/desktop and to extend mobility we installed private IM on the office workstations - something unheard of today - why would I need to do that having chat apps on the phone! Back to IM clients in the office - in the beginning all of them worked, ICQ, various Jabbers, Miranda, MSN, but then network admins started to block them (productivity?). So we installed Skype because our friends recommended it that it is able to bypass any block.
I can vouch for this. I was in long distance relationship with my then girlfriend across continents. Only skype was good enough. We had Google Talk but that was bad quality. Others are too troublesome. Skype can even call directly to local phone number so it is inherently cheaper then any IDD calls. Too bad Microsoft drove it down the bin.
Have been using Skype every day for years to talk with family members over the computer. I find it easier to use than Zoom. One real advantage of Skype over Zoom was that it could be set to auto-answer an incoming call. Zoom does not have that function. This really helped when contacting our elderly mother in her assisted living apartment. That was probably the main reason we did not switch to Zoom when it became popular.
Skype just has significantly better video and audio quality than Zoom.
I prefer Facebook Messenger Video to talk to the family and friends I have all over the world. I use Zoom for business. For both thou auto answer isn't a problem with me, because I always schedule a time to talk.
@@aliancemdseriously? My Main Problem with Skype has always been the quality of Video and audio. It has always been horrible for me, while competitors far outpassed it.
@@aliancemd In my experience it's the opposite - I find Zoom much better quality (especially audio, but also video somewhat). And screen share is better, too. But if I want to just talk to someone (e.g. my husband when one of us is traveling, or a project collaborator), on Skype I can just call and it will ring on their end; if I want to use Zoom, I have to plan ahead and schedule it. As far as I know, I can't get Zoom to "ring". Facebook Messenger will ring, but its quality is terrible. So for that reason I still use Skype, and so do several other people I know.
My skype just signed off and i could not sign in anymore - it said i had wrong password, even thou it was the right password i tried to recover through mail but even with their code i could not sign in. So that was the end of skype for me
Teams and Skype are two different people willing to travel in the same boat, and teams being a baby of Microsoft is definitely killing it and this is a perfect example of cannibalization.
I can’t understand teams, or anything in the Microsoft system for that matter. Skype was ridiculously simple. Log in, and call, voice or video. Trying to log in to a teams meeting took so long, I gave up, and called the phone number.
You sure MS didn't reverse engineered Skype and rebadged it as Teams Chat?
Skype is already dead long before teams came
Guys, Teams is totally based on Skype For Business. They took the business side and made Teams, while keeping Skype for personal usage.
@@AranhaWebs *Skype For Business* was not Skype, it was a program called *Lync* and re-branded as Skype.
I remember using it in 2004. My wife went to Japan, so we had to communicate, but convention phones were very expensive. Enter Skype, the quality of calls was very high for those times, although my internet was bad.
Internet was bad everywhere in the early through mid 2000s. Japan and South Korea may have been the exception.
I will say it was nice to have at one time. I was in Chile during the big 2010 quake. Thanks to an open wifi I found, I was able to make Skype calls home to let people know thinks were okay. Other than a long-running chat room I have going, I no longer use Skype.
As a Software Engineer of 7 years, one thing I have learnt is, make your software as simple as possible. There are more dumb than smart people in the world.
been the case for decades, it's called Industrial Engineering...
Also when smart people spend their whole day on meetings, solving problems and other things called life, brain fog becomes a real thing, so dumbing things down is quite helpful.
Then please use your skills. Because I see complete opposite happening. In the old days every button had an icon and a name. Even to help people over the phone was easy. Click on File then Print. Or click on Setup. Now it's like this: search for 3 dots. Search for 3 parallel lines. It's ridiculous how minimalism took over software design and you have to know what Bluetooth icon is, wifi or NFC. If you don't know the icon you are over. Nothing have names and colored icons with meanings are now dots and lines. I'm glad I'm not old, but I feel for the elderly these days. It's really complicated.
This is so true, as someone who works customer service 😭
@@FinnProp Sounds like you're suffering the pain of endless meetings there Finn.
Any conversation about Skype that doesn't include it's original unbreakable end-to-end encryption (and the US government's desire to break it, ostensibly, to combat terrorism) is missing out on a big part of why Skype was important.
To criminals
@@greg2502no one cares
Back then, it was Skype-ing, and I used it too. So when the pandemic first happened back in 2020, I was thinking why people were using either Zoom or Teams and not Skype
People gave up on Skype years before since there was almost no investment into the App itself and it has become outdated and buggy.
We gave up on it the first couple of years after MS got it. They overblowted with adds and on bs , so from a simple fast program , it became a pig. There is an excellent quote in this video "MS is the place products go to die". If you don't believe it - just ask Nokia.
Gotta love that cut to Jaan @12:10 "I'm concerned about humans being wiped out right now, so I'm not so concerned whether Skype will still be a thing in five years." 😂
He's such a positive guy.
when I want to make an international call to landline phones, I still use Skype. Their sound quality and stability still make them the best option in that field
How do you do that? They charge a huge fee
It's very cheap to do that & I do it too..
Exactly. There’s no other way to make international landline calls cheaply than Skype
@@mrde0mrsai Just buy an internet landline phone. You use a couple wires to plug into your internet router and then you can do international calls without paying for any apps or services.
could you elaborate more? @@aaanawaleh
I started using Skype again recently (once Zoom started restricting web conference calls to 40 minutes for free accounts, I was typically on calls for 60 minutes so it was annoying to get cut off and I don't use Zoom for business income purposes so there was no way I was going to be paying for another subscription).
I remember the days of gaming and having a giant ass Skype call with all my friends. Having those hours long calls while playing League is very nostalgic, but I'm glad that it's a thing of the past now. Services like Discord makes gaming a lot easier, and Zoom makes communicating at my job a lot easier than either Teams or Skype.
Good times indeed, including the people who would just join and blast an idiotic song for like a minute to troll.
I remember people using Vent for games, not Skype . It was like a requirement for MMO guilds back in the day.
I used Skype a lot to communicate with people who were in different countries and sometimes for business. Another name that was mentioned was Kazaa that was around the time I believe Napster was around as well. This was a cool segment and definitely took me back in time a bit
Good days when Kazaa and Morpheus was the cool thing in town.
Ebay got it and did nothing with it. Microsoft killed it
Ebay ownership is when most people found out and began using Skype. They should have kept it longer. MS ruined it.
I use Skype to give English classes and it's just great for what I do, I can chat with my class and send them materials, and do group calls, and record the class which automatically sends itself to the group, which is so effortless compared to anything else I've tried
Yes, I use Skype today for recording feature only.
The overall problem is not Skype itself but the company that has not supported it. Microsoft has shown that they prefer their apps and to have the fees to go with it. Skype is still the best for international calls and communications That should be promoted more by Microsoft instead of jumping on fads which come and go.
Skype was my MSN Messenger replacement (I still miss the good ol' Messenger of my early teens), loved it and it was the reason why I haven't made a long distance phone call since the mid 2000s.
Windows Live Messenger being replaced with Skype just made me hate Skype and all the customized functions I lost, lol.
@@BewareTheLilyOfTheValley lol yep, i hated skype with a passion because it was forced on me. such an ugly UI too (not that late-stage MSN was much better)
Ah, I remember my AIM days. We are relics, but at least we have our memories of a open, freer internet.
I started to use Skype very early. There were only about 1 milj users at that time. To me Skype wasn't that important since I didn't have a lot of friends abroad. But a friend of mine had all her relatives on Mauritius. A traditional phone call for her would cost more than 2 USD/minute. I told her about Skype and she was so grateful. She then only had to pay like a local phone call, a few cents/ minute AND the sound quality was better on Skype.
I also remember the 10-10-### numbers you could use to call Asia and abroad
@@danielzhang1916 - You paid to save money, then hoped you could hear and understand the other person and vice versa. So often what you paid got you nothing. My calls were to and from Peru. They were typically awful, especially with the cheapest cards.
I remember Zoom out of nowhere becoming *the* platform during the pandemic. I think 2 reasons: first you can use it thru browser/no downloads, and second, no login needed. Very seamless, easy to jump into.
yes! btw another platform BlueJeans was already doing that too even before but Zoom was better
Back in 2008 to 2010 I paid for a Skype number to use for actual phone calls from my apartment. The Sprint cellular service was terrible and I used a USB to telephone adapter hooked to my computer for phone calls. I integrated it with Google Voice conditional call forwarding to get phone calls to and from my cell phone and Skype number. It worked extremely well.
I live in Thailand and video chat with my 89 year-old mom in Virginia twice a day for about an hour at a time. We use Skype. She's used to Skype. I have most of the other communication, but Skype does excatly what I want and need. My mom understands how to use it, so it's absolutely fine. I also have a US phone number through Skype. I'd hate to lose that.
The perfect demographic' customers...for a company's growth :)😅
Skype was broken when Microsoft decided that it was no longer P2P. That was the one big advantage.
nope, if you don't understand how Microsoft works when buying direct competition tech then that's it.
I still use Skype, to do video calls with my elderly parents. Even though my mother has it on her iPad, they always use their Windows desktop computer for the calls. They don't use any other features of Skype. It wouldn't occur to them to do so. It's too much effort to move them to another app. They probably use it to do video calls with many others, so moving to another app would be major impact. And when I visit them, I don't want to be spending my time getting them to try a different app. The only way to get them to move would be to force them to move due to shutting down the service. I got them on it initially as I was getting them off dialup and onto broadband, with a new computer, back in the day. I bought a web cam to go with the computer. My sister lives in the USA. I live in Melbourne, Australia. My parents live in regional Queensland. I saw doing video calls on Skype as better than a phone call when we cannot be together. At the time, there was nothing comparable to Skype, and this was before the iPhone was available.
I used Skype for years for both business and personal use, but after MS took over, it became so buggy that I had to look for more stable alternatives. All my friends and colleagues moved too. It's a shame.
I still use skype to connect with my parents back in Poland 🇵🇱 my mom loves this old-fashioned app lol
Skype got stagnant and lost its market share when other platforms started rolling out some sort of internet communication functionality. FB Messenger was the go to in my area as a the most convenient way to make VCs. Almost everyone had an FB accounts and therefore finding people was real easy. In the office it was either Teams or Zoom. And when gaming it was Discord. Skype didn't have a specific space in the market and eventually died off.
Anyone remember that initially it was P2P and outsourced NAT traversal and mixing to super-nodes? That was saving money on data center hardware. It became fully centralized later. And the protocol always has been guarded secret.
summarized everything microsoft touches dies
True…😂
Bit of an exaggeration
dies? or brutally murdered? rest in peace word star and word perfect!
They don't touch themselves.
Skype was the generic name for a video call up to the Covid-19 pandemic then Microsoft killed it and let Zoom take over.
Back in 2004 I moved to Estonia and starting remote working for the following 2 decades. Skype was the only real option until 2015!
Living in the Philippines in 2000 communication with the USA and Europe was difficult and expensive. Skype solved those difficulties bot on a personal and business level. The ability to have a company telephone number in both London and New York for clients to call at their local charges greatly improved customer sommunication, as did being able to call a landline in the UK using local rates. Some of my relatives moved to Zoom but I still find Skype the best software for my uses.
Several Filipino companies should have solved your phone/email/communications issues. But they did not.
They could have been what Zoom is now had they been managed properly.
Discord was probably also a big factor in this. Teams likely acquired most of the 'professional' users.
Skype will still be in our Gen Z hearts forever. So many memories since 2008.
I still use it to video chat with my brother in Japan. We used it for years. We keep using it because it’s free and I have Apple products and he has Android and Windows products. Zoom costs money and Face time only works between Apple devices.
Why not use discord?
Skype have the best quality in call. I used it for gaming, even tho other gamers prefer team speaker. But unfortunately, Microsoft kept destroying the software every update making sure to irritate every user with horrible UI and changes that made no sense. The Skype oficial forum is full of angry users begging Microsoft to stop. The final shot that killed Skype was removing the access to Skype Classic. Just listen to your users. So simple yet so challenging for many companies.
I use it to make phone calls almost daily. However they have hidden the phone buttons 3 layers deep in the horrible UI!
What's funny is when covid hit, I had an Android and my girlfriend at the time had an iPhone. We lived three hours away. When we video chatted before covid, it was Facebook Messenger. Then, when we wanted to stream something together, we used Zoom because it was on both of our phones and it was the option with the least lag. We both tried Skype at the time, but there was too much lag on the screen sharing. I think of Zoom as purely a professional method of attending virtual meetings.I think of Skype as something my friends would use (which we did when I was in high school), but now, during job interviews, it's Zoom, Google Meets or Teams...Skype in the US, at least in my experience is non existent.
I completely agree with you! I viewed Skype as a very laidback/casual platform, where my friends and family members could reach me. But since I work in corporate America, we use a ton of Microsoft products (Teams, Outlook, OneNote, etc), and I’ve just grown accustomed to using Teams and Zooms in my everyday life, because I use it so often professionally.
Businesses that upgrade to Microsoft 365 suite (office apps) will likely switch from Skype to Teams
It was my go-to app when I moved to HK and wanted to communicate with my family back in Spain. Part of software history that allowed later development of next-gen products. Thanks Skype!
I had a job interview two years ago that was on Skype. I had forgotten my login, but it was still there. I have good memories of it, I remember doing alpha and beta testing on Skype for Linux after Microsoft bought it and saw how ugly the Linux version looked (it looked like the UI hadn't been updated in almost a decade). I feel like for myself and many friends, Discord has taken the lead as where to go for voice calls, meetings, and group chats, now with all sorts of new features like screen sharing, games, allowing people to join and be muted until a mod unmutes them, which is great for large groups and seminar type events. Skype was great for talking to family that was too far, or friends in different countries, but for day to day stuff, there are better options. Even Telegram has been expanding into more calling options.
I really liked Skype and used it so much in early 2000s. Skype unlike modern other services used to work on slow Dial-up connections, which was magic at the time.
you must be old
There is literally nothing wrong with Skype. The call quality and stability is among the best, if not the best. Skype is just like the two neighbouring cafés one left and one right side of the road, which both offer the same items at similar prices. One is stuffed with people, the other one is empty and has the waiters yawning. The crowd just decided to patronize the right one, but nobody really knows why, except "because everyone is here".
Skype was once the undisputed king of video calling, but its journey over the years has been quite a rollercoaster ride. From revolutionizing communication to facing fierce competition, its story is both fascinating and cautionary.
I started to use Skype in 2003 to call my sister and brother-in-law in Alaska and it was marvelous. As Mr Male said, what every big corporation buys they destoyed it because of the large number of middle managers and the charges that they started to apply ... Microsoft, Google and Meta are a pest for Human kind...
I suspect many consumers think Teams is Skype's replacement, and that Skype itself is a legacy app being supported by Microsoft until it eventually doesn't. And most businesses I work with opt for Teams over Zoom for security reasons, but NONE of them opt for Skype. Not one.
This video is missing one important technical details that explains Skype's irrelevance today: Skype was originally a peer-to-peer application: calls went directly from one user to the other. This was great for latency in the early 2000s and great for server infrastructure costs. But this model did not work once people switched to mobile, made it virtually impossible to have group calls, and made it hard to spy on calls … I mean monetize users. Microsoft had to change it to a centralized service, which provided no immediate value to customers and left it stagnant for a long time while new contenders could go centralized from the beginning.
I remember being an early adopter of skype. Used to be something called SkypeME and used to ring random people in my town and interact with them. That was fun!
I still use skype, just like i did 10-15 years ago. Most of my contacts are inactive for long , but a few still remained and use it.
Not a single mention of Discord, the app that actually killed off Skype to the mainstream.
What’s discord?
Mind Begs the Question: If allowing Login,online access Only via Google,Apple ID Undemocratically making Global/Digital ID of people,no?
Discord was one of the apps that replaced Skype but it isn’t what killed it.
Naah, if there's any app killed off Skype's relevancy, it's Zoom.
Discord just took away a majority of Skypes gaming community, it was still very relevant in business use.
Skype had a moment in the sun, post MSN messenger era which was post AOL instant messenger era, and was still pre-mobile smartphone. Skype COULD be way bigger but it's not likely anymore. A huge uncovered competitor to Skype is Facetime and you're not going to get users to switch from Apple to Skype today. It's basically over for Skype with a slow coast to irrelevance.
The reason my and my friends (mostly gamers at the time) switched from skype to discord is because skype made all of these weird changes that no one asked for or wanted. The app got really buggy, they changes the location of buttons and overall just changed things too much.
Great article! Well done!
I still use Skype.
Skype is great for international calling, I still use it to call landlines, and cellphones in other countries. I hope it won't die any time soon, but it does have a niche market which is people in need to make international calls. Also it's excellent to have a foreign number that will ring your phone in another country. That isn't available in any other apps.
I still use this for teaching online. It's the best and so simple!🤷🏽♂️
Discord killed Skype for gamers, which were tired of online resolvers being able to give out their IPs. That left a small fraction of users alone. The real question is who remembers Xfire?
I've also used TeamSpeak before
Sucks that all my friends use it because we all seem to have far more problems with discord than I ever had with skype.
When the pandemic hit and everybody was forced to work from home, I thought they were using Skype and then I started hearing zoom. And I was like what is zoom? What happened to Skype?
As an immigrant, Skype was a groundbreaking lifeline across countries. Before then was buying a minutes phone card from a sketchy store. Such a shame to see such innovation die at Microsoft but that was the Ballmer era… boring business software only
@CNBC - Y'all should do a Throwback and do a "What ever happened to LimeWire"! I recently turned on my old Windows XP desktop computer and I completely forgot about LimeWire and Bearshare! I remember them days lmao
7:48 that comment was just brilliant 😂
Skype had a horrible self-obscuring coding to find any gap in firewalls by guessing of open ports or triggering Routers to keep some port in open for some seconds enough to establish the dataflow. It is was always a nightmare for network administrators and security stuff, but the whole thing was always about doing those brutal network tactics to get through every home internet router...
I love Skype , because we can record our class conversation and as far as I’m concerned this free capability means a lot for us . None of the other platforms have this free feature along with the features that are needed for a virtual class.
Putting your comment from Microsoft's internal perspective, you like that Microsoft can record your conversation and monetize it, but will also allow you free access to that recording.
At a time when video calling was key to staying in touch with people nobody talked about or used Skype.
Skype was my first chat app. I respect trailblazers and this is why I still keep the app on my desktop. Indeed, many love stories started on Skype and that alone is worthy of saying well done SYKPE, what a journey is has been. I will keep you until my monitor screen goes blank!
Skype still works great. It's a great cross platform discussion.
It hasn't fallen yet, there are millions using it at the moment as well, its just that they stopped focusing on promotions and marketing, Microsoft is more focused on their other products! Imagine with the technology of Ai in Advanced it will be awesome to See if they integrate Ai technolgy to it and introduce some additional products attached to it then Microsoft can still revive its growth exponentially!
I imagine a lot of Skype's drop-off has been at least partly due to the US ending two wars spanning the length of 20 years. Skype was a revolution in giving troops a cheap and fairly reliable means of calling home, and even more amazingly the ability for families to actually call their deployed troop on holidays, birthdays, etc. Before that, it was an AT&T phone card and a payphone, or SEGOVIA internet cafes; both of these options were at predatory prices, and both options were one way initiation (troop calling home versus families being able to call Iraq). As internet connectivity became more widespread and cheaper, it rendered the AT&T phone card completely obsolete, and meant the line for a call home dramatically decreased in size and wait time.
I really feel grateful to Skype for having enabled me to communicate with my mom in Japan for however many hours for free while abroad back then. ^^
Skype is still popular in corporate sector
Skype still has value. When it comes to redundancy. Like if zoom goes down. You need a back up. Skype is like that guy who was always there for you when you needed to get picked up from the nightclub.
Lol. So basically, Skype is in the friend zone! 😅
Skype is a re-bound.
Skype connected me and all of my friends with our families when we all decided to make life happen in different countries. I will always remember that sound😢
I still use it for its long distance calling feature. Handy when traveling and trying to call restaurants for reservations.
I thought Skype was discontinued years ago. I just learned that it still actually exists lol.
So you'd be surprised if i told you that ICQ also still exists? :)
@@asdfhun Node splits and all.
Yup, Skype and ICQ still exist.
Yes, I am very surprised.
Skype may be down in USA or EU. But alive and well in Asia countries.
We still use Skype to talk to parents, who are older and got used to Skype back in the 2000s and are still clinging to it - it's not easy to change the old habit
I used Skype a lot not just personal but also professionally.. at that time most the employers were interviewing on Skype if the candidate is not local .
Skype could had made a comeback during the pandemic
I use Skype everyday, in my view it is the best platform for videocalls from computers.
For goodness sakes, this feels just like yesterday! I don't consider this dead like I would consider dial-up dead. In fact, the opposite, as I was a regular Skyper, even when I got FTTH internet! In 2013, 2014 and 2015, that ringtone was the norm for me! (even though I likely started using it in 2012, because of my buddy who graduated in 1999, when I graduated in 2002)
Our multinational company is using it till today for internal communication and it is improving day by day and out performing. I would suggest using it.
Microsoft ditched it for Teams.
We used to use Skype at work. It was annoying when we would do voice and video calls - especially internationally. Always dropped the calls - it was horrible. We finally went with Zoom which was a better amazing platform.
Skype at work was Microsoft-modified crap. The OG Skype was a lot better before Microsoft acquisition.
As someone who still uses the same account on Skype from 2011 I'm surprised how many people to still use it to this day.
I still use Skype to talk to Apple support whenever i can’t figure out something. And before that I used to pay on Skype to call on landlines and phone numbers in my home country when I was staying in a foreign country. In both cases, Skype is still so good for me till today.
microsoft happened. whenever new app appears which is not controlled by tech giants, - they are either killing it or buying . blackberry there as well. nokia?
When Zoom got popular especially during the covid pandemic, it was the downfall of Skype...
Thats when I thought it went down myself. Covid and "Zoom" became a buzzword.
I’m talking every day with my sister for an hour or two. The best way to see each other without flying to another country
I and a friend use Skype to video chat once a week for about 75 minutes. Every time I run the program, there's an update and nothing apparent changes. I believe there have been three updates in the last three weeks. No added functionality and the program has some very annoying design choices. It is what it is. I don't use/have Teams, and Zoom and Webex are for business meetings, not catching up with a friend. Weekly, we curse at Skype, but still use it. That makes us masochists.
microsoft purchased skype is what happened and you know what that means
Yes, M$ and their reverse Midas Touch. Everything they touch turns to mold.
Still use it 😂🤣
I was one of the early Skype adopters. I am missing this ringtone today as to me it meant a call from my mom who passed away six years ago and I stopped using Skype for emotional reasons.
Discord killed Skype socially, Teams killed Skype in a business/educational sense. But ultimately Skype killed itself.
Just call this crap for what it is, Skype = RIP🙄
Who needs Skype when we have these other free calling services. That's the problem Skype wasn't free. Every Time I tried to make a call it always said I needed skype credits.
I never really cared about any of the trends. I just used it a lot to talk to a lady friend, and it was super easy to use and never messed with my ability to communicate freely with friends, unlike nearly every other site/platform/POS.
Uhh .. I run and participate in teams all across the globe. I ALWAYS have skype open on my desktop, laptop, and phone. And I'm not alone. So, I think declaring skype dead is a little premature.
Skype went from being a mainstream juggernaut to being just another player in the game. I mean Skype was the verb people used for video calls for a while. It’s like if Google suddenly was being outperformed by Bing. It might still be around but it would be a shell of its former self. That’s what they mean when they said dead. Not that it’s literally going to be discontinued.