{"id":593518,"date":"2025-05-05T16:02:00","date_gmt":"2025-05-05T14:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/?p=593518"},"modified":"2025-05-05T16:08:44","modified_gmt":"2025-05-05T14:08:44","slug":"skype-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/593518-skype-is-dead.html","title":{"rendered":"Skype is dead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

Here lies Skype.<\/strong>
Born 29 August 2003. Departed 5 May 2025.
Once the bane of Telkom and the voice of the Internet,
Skype now echoes through the cloud eternal \u2014
archived forever on the great file server in the sky.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Software giant Microsoft shut down Skype on Monday, 5 May 2025 and is directing users to switch to its Slack rival, Microsoft Teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

News that Microsoft was planning to shut down Skype first leaked at the end of February<\/a> when a member of the XDA Developers community discovered a message to that effect in the code of a preview version of Skype.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Microsoft published a statement shortly afterwards confirming that Skype\u2019s end was nigh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSkype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and supporting countless meaningful moments,\u201d said Jeff Teper, Microsoft president of collaborative apps and platforms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe are honoured to have been part of the journey.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skype\u2019s shuttering is a stark reminder of how quickly a position of market dominance can be swept from under you in the tech world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before services like Skype, the only affordable way to communicate with friends and family overseas was by post or email. International voice calls were \u2014 and often still are \u2014 prohibitively expensive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skype changed that. It let people connect across continents, not just cheaply, but for free, as long as both sides had an internet connection.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a result, Skype became a verb \u2014 much like Google, Photoshop, and Uber. \u201cSkype me\u201d was once the universal shorthand for making voice or video calls over the Internet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although former fixed-line monopoly Telkom said it was unafraid about Skype\u2019s impact on international call revenues, it was clearly terrified.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before Skype was even a year old, Telkom warned<\/a> that voice-over-IP calls were illegal in South Africa. As with South Africa\u2019s other dated and nonsensical regulations, the warning stopped precisely no one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, even though the corporate instant messaging and videoconferencing sector was Skype\u2019s to lose, a series of missteps allowed new kids on the block, Slack and Zoom, to gain their footing in the market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a story often repeated in the tech world: BlackBerry lost to Apple and Android, WhatsApp killed MXit, and Microsoft Internet Explorer lost to Google Chrome despite how entrenched it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s adapt or die. And Skype? It died.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

End of an era<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Skype was founded by Swede Niklas Zennstr\u00f6m and Dane Janus Friis in 2003, but its software was built by Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, Jaan Tallinn, and Toivo Annus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It originally ran on a hybrid peer-to-peer and client-server system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

eBay bought Skype for $2.6 billion (R16.5 billion, at the time) with a mix of cash and eBay stock in 2005.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a consortium of investors bought 65% of the business from eBay in 2009, it was valued at $2.92 billion (R24.5 billion, at the time).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Former Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer made an uncharacteristically splashy bet on the market leader in online calls, paying $8.5 billion, a 40% premium to Skype\u2019s internal valuation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The May 2011 deal was the largest acquisition by Microsoft at the time, and Skype became a key piece of its strategy for the emerging mobile age \u2014 including replacing Windows Live Messenger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Microsoft infamously started inserting ads into Skype in September 2011.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It didn\u2019t pan out as Ballmer would have hoped. Upstarts like WhatsApp, Telegram, Snapchat, and WeChat solved problems that Skype didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By May 2012, the hybrid peer-to-peer model was gone and Skype had been migrated to Microsoft-operated supernodes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skype also found itself mired in Microsoft\u2019s corporate bureaucracy, being shoehorned into the Office division and under orders to build tools geared toward a workplace audience as well as a consumer one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It soon shipped features like animated emojis, stickers, and GIFs \u2014 undermining Skype\u2019s reputation as a serious business tool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Slack onslaught<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Skype\"
Many Skype customers disliked Microsoft\u2019s attempts to turn it into more of a social app<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Skype was made the default messaging app for Windows 8.1 in 2013 and came pre-installed on every device shipped with or upgraded to the operating system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was the same year Slack arrived on the scene, and Skype users were complaining that elements of the core experience had started to break down.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They cited missed or phantom calls and failures to sync information on different devices. The company worked to improve the service\u2019s reliability, but some loyal users were put off by frequent redesigns, including a short-lived effort to fashion Skype in the mold of Snapchat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2017, the service was migrated to centralised Microsoft Azure servers and received several new cloud-based features.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That same year, Microsoft launched its more comprehensive collaboration software Teams and announced that Skype for Business would be gradually phased out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Microsoft, which also saw its acquisition of Nokia\u2019s mobile phone business end in failure, is far from alone in encountering rejection by a fickle consumer market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alphabet\u2019s Google has cycled through several iterations and brands for its online communications tools, which are today known as Chat and Meet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This month, Amazon also said it would be winding down Chime, the video and voice calling service it tried with little success to sell to corporate clients.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Teams is \u201cgoing well and this is a step to double down on it,\u201d Teper said, adding that Microsoft wanted to keep Skype running until it was confident that the Teams version for individual users was fully ready.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s the most successful product in its category by far,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here lies Skype. Once the bane of Telkom and the voice of the Internet, Skype now echoes through the cloud eternal \u2014 archived forever on the great file server in the sky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":593520,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16],"tags":[123,1089],"class_list":["post-593518","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-internet","category-software","tag-microsoft","tag-skype"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593518"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=593518"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593518\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":593524,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/593518\/revisions\/593524"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/593520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=593518"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=593518"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=593518"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}