I jumped on Skype about as soon as it was launched. There were times I pushed its limits even for recording podcasts.
Then Microsoft acquired it. Skype quickly lost its utility. It has resided on my computer for years. I can’t think of a time when I’ve actually used it in the past 10 years.
This story of small, innovative company selling to a large corporation only for users to lose the utility of the product happens so often it’s almost trite. I bet you can think of a dozen examples just in the industrial technology arena. (I won’t list for the sake of brevity.)
But Skype was ground breaking. A great tool. Now Microsoft suggests that we should switch to Teams. I hate using Teams. I hate the interface. I hate the way it keeps asking for new logins. I hate the way it acts on a Mac. Good luck.
Om Malik, one of my favorite tech observers whom I’ve read for maybe 30 years, wrote a great obituary on Skype. It’s worthy of a read. Here’s the beginning.
On May 5, Microsoft retired Skype, the startup that sparked a communication revolution. I won’t repeat myself, as I’ve already published a postmortem analyzing Skype’s decline under Microsoft’s 14-year ownership of the platform, for which it paid $8.5 billion.
Just like Nokia, Skype created one of the most iconic internet ringtones, and it will likely exist in archives. At its peak in 2009, Skype had 405 million users. They all probably heard it. To me, it will always represent what the internet sounded like in the 2000s.
