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
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 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.
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:
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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…
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.
I would say this heavily depends on the region. In Germany, I knew nobody who used MSN, everyone only used ICQ.
That’s why I said around these parts. Back then there was a lot more regional fragmentation.
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.
They killed it as soon as they acquired it.
I think Microsoft killed Skype like 20 years ago.
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!
Good! They could have cornered the market during Covid, but fumbled the ball.
(nsfw language)
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.
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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.
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.
That’s fine I’ll just use Lync.
