It's officially the end of an era: Skype is finally shutting down this year, almost exactly fourteen years to the day from when Microsoft acquired it on May 10, 2011. The decision comes as Microsoft shifts focus to Teams--a platform that a surprising number of people really dislike, but most of us are stuck with if we work an office job.
Skype's userbase has been declining for years thanks to the rise of many functionally similar tools. Microsoft has been strategically realigning, and Skype's few remaining active users will now need to migrate to another platform. Skype has steadily lost users since Covid forced many people to explore all available options for video calls and chatting.
Alternatives include Microsoft's own Teams as well as Eric Yuan's Zoom (owned in shares by the likes of Blackrock, Vanguard, and Fidelity among others), Google's Meet, Jason Citron's Discord, and Meta-Facebook's Whatsapp, among others. Most users have probably moved to using FaceTime on their iPhone, and the Skype stragglers have probably been pestered enough to move over to Teams by now.
Microsoft recommends that Skype users move all contacts and conversation data to Teams by logging in with their existing Skype credentials. That's a move any die-hard Skype stragglers would seem likely to make if they're attached to their message history or their list of contacts (are we still allowed to say "buddy list"? We should bring back the "buddy list").
Skype's popularity was the beginning of a shift that revolutionized online communication. I recall a brief period when "Skyping" became synonymous with video calling (Though now it seems to have given way to "Zooming" and "FaceTiming"). At its inception, Skype was the program that seemed positioned "after" AOL Instant Messenger--It was a post-text platform with video calls as the central feature. Most people don't think in text on a computer screen, like you and I, dear reader.
The official cutoff date for dear old Skype is May 5, 2025. Another legacy brand dismantled for the sake of corporate simplification and "the bottom line".
~[MD]