Microsoft is reportedly killing Skype
Skype's days are numbered, as the Skype apps are now warning users that the service will be going away on May 5, and that existing users should migrate to Teams.
They are not killing Skype, they just now bury the corpse. Skype died by malnutrion and bad parenting by MS a decade ago.
Well, they’re doing what they already have been and absorbing it into teams. Teams video chat is littered with the bits of leftover Skype tech references, they’re just making sure it’s an enterprise product they can bill monthly for instead of a free consumer product
I find 365 to be a terrible mess if applications, outlook and teams have a calendar separate to the calendar app. Teams sucks
Teams is skype4biz, which was Lync, which was MSCommunicator...which was a shitty netMeeting.
The Skype you see in Teans[sic] is not the same animal.
I was going to say it couldn't have been a decade but then I realized the last time I used Skype was about 2015 2016...
I used it only the other day. Worked flawlessly.
In related news, when I turned on the tap in my kitchen, water still came out. And it's been installed for yeeears.
Well, bad news for your skype-faucet. Water will stop running in Mai.
Another company Microsoft bought and ran into the ground. It’s really incredible that they managed to get their lunch stolen. They had basically a monopoly and gave it away without a fight. Hell, the colloquialism for video calling someone was to Skype them for a looong time.
And then one small competitor comes along and it’s all gone. How can you fuck up this bad? Especially during the pandemic, in which they should have further entrenched their monopoly…
Was Skype really relevant when the pandemic hit? Nobody I knew used it anymore. And teams had mostly taken over for Skype for business by then as well.
My org used Skype For Business and it worked remarkably well. Much more lightweight, though somehow still a little less responsive than it should have been.
It has that "it just works" factor for video calling, whereas Teams almost needs a fucking checklist to rattle through if someone's audio or video feed isn't working.
Skype for business is Skype in name only. It’s basically Office communicator with several name changes
Around these parts in the 2000s, MSN Messenger was what literally everyone used. Then Microsoft bought Skype and decided to shut down MSN Messenger. Then they also ruined Skype. Microsoft just can't do anything right despite making so much money. It's like they have no long term vision.
God it's like Gavin Fucking Belson at Hooli is running shit
Where I live, everyone used AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM for short. It was popular with teens because it offered chat rooms, but that meant it was also a popular hunting ground for predators. Nearly every terminally online teen from the late 90’s and early 2000’s has a story about getting groomed on AIM, by someone they initially thought was their own age.
Then Google Chat and Facebook Messenger came along, (and AOL’s subscriber count began to dwindle as people moved to broadband internet) and it was almost completely dead by 2010.
Lololol Skype was already dying when eBay fucked up. Hardcore revisionism here.
I remember when Skype first came out, when I was a teenager. I called a random guy in Japan; he was learning English, I wanted to learn Japanese (as is tradition for teenage anime fans). It was a very kind series of calls, and we talked a bit about Japanese culture too. He taught me, rather patiently, how to pronounce certain basic words properly.
It's a shame the service was treated like it has been. There was great potential in connecting people.
Wherever you are, random Japanese dude I forgot the name of, konbanwa!!
My feelings on this:
The bigger headline is "Skype hasn't been dead this whole time"
One of my clients is a small company that has been running with seven staff working from home, scattered around the globe, mostly rural. Since 1999. Everything has been held together by skype: chat, video, audio.
Should be interesting finding the right new workflow!
They just reskinned it and slapped irc in it and called it teams
It also cobbled in groups from Exchange, and the Collab site from SharePoint. Its pretty much three raccoons in a trench-coat.
You mean teams... No! You mean new teams! No! You mean teams for home use and teams for work! No! You mean new experience teams! Maybe you mean blue teams for use on a moving vehicle between 25 and 60mph on a Wednesday with the windows open while talking to exactly 2 or your close friends who are wearing blue blazers and jeans while drinking coffee but not from Starbucks at their house but not the bedroom and having their living rooms painted magenta in water color teams? Is it that teams? I'm a little confused as to what teams I'm using. I only use it at work because fuck no, I will never use it at home.
Or, if it was named by users of Microsoft products:
New Teams (2) Final-Final (1) Final-THIS ONE
They killed it as soon as they acquired it.
It became a bloated pile of garbage after they bought it. Remember how horrible the app became with battery usage??
I think Microsoft killed Skype like 20 years ago.
10 years ago it was very mainstream.
I forgot Skype still exists. They killed it a long time ago, now they will just make it official
It's amazing how they fumbled this. There was a time when video calls were Skype. Everybody was using Skype, everybody had it installed, people used it to chat and then ... something happened. Microsoft did nothing. Or did the wrong kind of stuff. Software started to suck. And when the pandemic came, Zoom took over and nobody even tried to use Skype. That really, really are some bad business decisions there
It didn't "start to suck", they intentionally transitioned it, from old lean clients working over p2p usable in unbelievably bad connectivity conditions, to something server-based and fat laggy clients with typical Microsoft quality. They they turned off authentication servers for the old Skype.
If the old Skype were still functional today, nobody would say it sucks. OK, maybe no stickers and such.
That's Microsoft for you
I totally forgot it exists, meaning I thought it was already dead.
(nsfw language)
Forgot it was even still around.
Good! They could have cornered the market during Covid, but fumbled the ball.
When COVID started there already where shitload of apps that could do voice. They killed it long time ago by simply making it hard to use, the interface was a complete mess. In the meantime for example there was already Whatsapp dominant with easy to use interface and controls
Reportedly? It's been dead since (in case of Linux) version 84.3 (just to hint at its age, it's in Qt 4 and supports ALSA) stopped logging in.
Exchanging files via Skype was very easy. Roleplaying in groupchats.
It seems like a very underrated feature but Skype's overseas calling feature was great and the 60 mins I get each month with 365 was really nice. Them getting rid of that basically made Skype useless.
I have a load of credit on there still (got tricked by them deactivating my credit and topped up unnecessarily). I still use it for international calls at least once a month, I hope this news story is overblown.
That's fine I'll just use Lync.
Thank goodness! My parents refuse to move the group chat to anything else.
Skype? Wasn't this the buggy voice chat?
Yeah, for about a week. It's been awesome for the 20 years since. I've used it on some really shitty internet on a weekly-to-daily basis and I've only been amazed at its reliability.
So it stands to reason in 2025 America that we need to destroy something just because it works and works well.
You shoulda tried it. Too bad. It dynamically switched codecs based on congestion, it punched through nats like none before it; it just worked.
None of this "Skype in name" Lync mess.
Who? Never heard of him
I still use it to make international calls to family (it's my only use case for it). Does anyone know of a good replacement (preferably FOSS) that allows calling on landlines (yup, old people still use them)?
You can do this using JMP Chat, which bridges phone numbers to XMPP. Unfortunately, it's USA and Canada only, for now.
Alternatively, you can use a "SIP Trunk Provider". For instance, in the UK, Andrews and Arnold offers this service. You can then connect any compatible SIP client (e.g. Gnome Calls).
In the same boat. Not even just old people; I need to call 800 numbers but it would cost me a ton from Japan. Guess I'm doing that Monday night.
I don't think Skype numbers are supported as well anymore, but many people rely on services for their US banks and stuff for 2fa as well.
Not FOSS but you can check Google Voice and see if the pricing for the country you need to call is convenient
Ding dong the witch is dead
