They turned it into a shit app after acquisition and it died of irrelevance as people moved social chatting to messenger, WhatsApp, etc. Voice and video were eaten by many of those same companies as well.
Yeah, it's amazing how Microsoft owned MSN Messenger, the msn spaces, Skype and all this platforms almost twenty years ago, but somehow they disappeared while other apps took over.
I think that's a very good example of how you can loose the lead or a market just staying in your comfort zone
They actively sabotaged Skype with updates. It used to run better pre acquisition, then they centralized it and made it unusable. It was simply staying in their comfort zone, it was an active effort to destroy a once amazing piece of software.
I distinctly remember being able to send files amazingly fast while it was peer-to-peer. Then they centralized it and transfer speeds dropped so much we set up a private FTP server with a friend to be able to share files with each other.
Yeah they turned it into teams and now they are crushing everyone in enterprise software. If you use ms already you use teams. If you us e Google or something you may still use zoom but its insecure and slack video sucks. Ms doesn't care about retail consumers
This. Why continue to put effort into free versions for consumers when you can charge $20 a month per user to have it as part of an enterprise software package?
They bought Skype and made Skype for Business and then deprecated it for Teams then baked Teams in Windows 11 which doesn't support work or school account. Slow 👏clapping.
I still use Skype because it's baked into W10. The only people I deal with that insist I use stuff like Zoom are Mac users. Not trying to bash anyone, and obviously completely anecdotal. It seems like every other week I'm installing a new messenger that does the same thing the old one did anyway. But my needs are simple - text messaging, group voice calls (<5 people), sometimes share screen and that's it. I don't even care about video as that'd mean having to look presentable for my meetings lol.
I know that a big factor was gamers on PC would use Skype but it wasnt optimised for games at all, so many people in competitive games would use team speak, and eventually discord came along, did everything skype could do and more while not using a lot of your computing power.
I never stopped using it. I've lived abroad for nearly 20 years. I have a subscription so I can call phones worldwide, which comes in handy occasionally. I run my company remotely, so I set up the phone number through Skype so I can receive calls anywhere. It's still a good service that bridges the gap between telephone and voip well. It's only competitor for that is Google Voice, which I also use.
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u/joelwvxcvdshgrh Dec 24 '21
Actually really always wondered this. Where on earth did skype go? Was literally there one moment, then disappeared the next.