I’ve been using Skype for cheaper international calls to family that still relies on phones instead of video calls etc. I’ll need to check what happens with my credit. Any recommendations for an alternative?
Immigration Canada: “Prove to us that your marriage is genuine. Prove that it wasn’t for immigration purposes.”
My wife and I: “You sure you want that?”
Immigration Canada: “Make with the proof.”
My wife and I: 400 pages, front and back, of Skype call logs/timestamps. A fucking literal ream of paper
I don’t want to say the country, but when I went with my wife for me to get residency via marriage, this is how it went.
Immigration Officer: Do you have any questions? Me: No Immigration Officer: Sign here and come back in a month with your passport to implement the visa Me: Uhh… That’s it? OK Bye.
deleted by creator
Amazing how Skype went from a verb to the shadow realm. MS could’ve done so much more.
Word on the street is that MS couldn’t harvest the data they wanted out of Skype, even after turning off the encryption. So they let the Skype team keep on going because of reasons, while silently replacing them with teams.
Would seem almost intentional given the size and success of the company. How do you fuck something like that up so badly? Seems like one of those Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deals or similar
Skype was always shit. It was being first to market that made it popular. It was one of the first ways to get cheaper and free informational calling. By the time MS purchased it vent and ts became popular as well as zoom and others entering the space.
One of the things skype did first and best was decent noise filtering, transforming peoples shit audio equipment to something you could listen to for more than 5 minutes without going crazy.
For sure, Skype/eBay did a lot right at first. But by the time MS bought it, it was already falling from favor.
Wait…MICROSOFT owns skype??? Was this always the case, or did they do something stupid where they bought skype during the heyday, and immediately tank it just a few years before the pandemic? Because Zoom really had a field day in 2020.
So, which is it? Did they always own it, or were they a buyer of an established skype that tanked it like Verizon did with tumblr? Or that other company did with myspace?
I remember a theory that the US government asked Microsoft to purchase Skype and change it from p2p to server-based, so that they could intercept decrypted communications.
Skype was originally made by a European company (Latvian?).
My father, who worked for a huge computer manufacturer, was once approached by two young dudes asking for a server for their new startup. He listened to their proposition but couldn’t see how they were going to stay in business, so he turned them down and they went elsewhere for their hardware.
This was the two founders of Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, some 20 years ago.
Teams has a lot of Skype references under the hood…
yep, i was always under the assumption they bought it for parts to use in teams.
