Skype is dead. What happened?

Microsoft is shutting down Skype. It will go offline in May 2025.

“We’ve learned a lot from Skype over the years that we’ve put into Teams as we’ve evolved teams over the last seven to eight years,” Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, said in an interview with CNBC. “But we felt like now is the time because we can be simpler for the market, for our customer base, and we can deliver more innovation faster just by being focused on Teams.” (CNBC)

It makes me incredibly sad, but I am not surprised. The writing was on the wall. Skype has been dying a slow death for a long time. As far back as 2018, it was obvious what lay in store. At the time, I wrote about the great Skype vanishing.

Skype, was once a beloved product, one that I loved using every day. It was a product I wrote about long before it was trendy. I sent the team feedback. Like all tiny apps that are good at what they do, it became popular and grew really fast. It was sold to eBay, and then re-sold to Microsoft. And that’s when the magic disappeared. Through series of mergers and managers, Skype became an exact opposite of what I loved about it — independent outsider which was great at — chat, messaging and phone calls. It had just enough features, and its desktop client was minimal in its perfection.  Now, as I tweeted in the past, it is “a turd of the highest quality.”

Microsoft now talks about Teams being their focus, showing that even today they haven’t realized what made Skype a cultural, consumer force. Microsoft Teams is a terrible product — and I dread using it. In simplest terms, Teams is a perfect encapsulation of a bureaucratic, archaic, and outdated 50-year-old company that is trying to reinvent itself as an AI leader.

More on that another time, but for now, let’s call it what it is. Microsoft bought and effectively killed Skype. I could write a Ph.D. dissertation on this — for now, this is all I have to say. Microsoft didn’t know how to nurture Skype, and its bureaucracy killed one of the most iconic brands of the new century. Skype was the precursor to WhatsApp’s global success. At one point, I even suggested that Facebook should buy Skype.

In one swoop, Facebook would dominate what I’ve maintained is both the new age and classic social networking. They have people’s credit cards; they have their real-world phone information; and in the end, they have a better, more useful, social graph than Facebook itself.

The Skype-Facebook client on the desktop would mean both Facebook and Skype will be jointly in people’s faces, and take time away from other web services, such as Google. A simple search box inside the Skype client, and the two companies are starting to take attention away from arch-nemesis, Google.

It single-handedly destroyed the long-distance calling business. Most young people today don’t remember, but long-distance calls used to cost a lot of money. Especially for immigrants, calling home used to cost a fortune. Skype made it free. Skype co-founder and Atomico chief Niklas Zennstrom told FT:

“Skype was a revolutionary product of its time and I will always be proud and grateful for the early team members and investors who took a chance on us. Now other firms are innovating in this space to offer new services for a whole new generation, many of whom will have no idea of how expensive it used to be to call Australia.”

Skype was the original gangsta of “network effects.” But it was more than just that. Like the original iPod, Skype was an early harbinger of technology as culture. To illustrate this point, here is a small sample of what Skype meant to society, which should help readers understand how powerful the brand has been.

  • In the 2010 movie, The Social Network, Zuckerberg’s character is on a Skype call.
  • In 2012, in Skyfall, villain Raoul Silva uses Skype-like video calls to plot nefarious activities.
  • In The Office (U.S.) – Jim and Pam rely on Skype for their long-distance relationship.
  • In Breaking Bad, Walter White’s lawyer, Saul Goodman, often uses Skype for secretive communications.
  • In Parks and Recreation, Ben Wyatt uses Skype to communicate with Leslie while working in Washington, D.C.

Skype’s demise is a good lesson in how ineffective middle management can destroy good acquisitions. I have never met a Skype manager on Microsoft’s side who had any imagination. Most were such “drones” that next to them even a red clay brick would come across as a genius work of art.

I wonder how Skype would have fared under the new Satya Nadella regime. One of the truly iconic digital brands, it had enough data for them to train their audio and video AI models. Look at what Facebook does with WhatsApp.

Skype was a great early introduction to distributed internet, one that was free from the legacy of client-server models that dominated the world at that time. In a way, Skype was what Web3 wants to be — a large, massive network loosely coupled.

For me, Skype was a great story. I covered it extensively. As I wrote on this website a long time ago, it was the story of a lifetime. I was on the story of its first deal when it was bought by eBay. I covered it as a startup. I broke the story when Microsoft bought it. This has been one of my favorite startups to write about. Plus, it allowed me to have some good times the founders, build memories, and make so many friends along the way.

If you want to know what happened to Skype, here is a great little documentary CNBC did a couple of years ago. It is a trip down memory lane but accurately sums up how this brand died.

Technology
26 comments

Subscribe to discover Om’s fresh perspectives on the present and future.

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

26 thoughts on this post

  1. Skype’s a great loss, especially to those wanting to maintain international connections without incurring colossal phone bills.
    But it just didn’t keep pace with the march of social media and how those platforms expanded from basic messaging boards to the interactive versions we have today, i.e. live phone calling via electronic devices and people’s willingness to pay internet bills = primary communication. Owning a data supply is now more important than owning a landline or even a bog standard mobile phone.
    Sorry Skype – loved you for a long time.

    1. Skype is what happens to when cool startups end up at boring big companies where founders have checked out.

  2. I do remember using Skype during the aughts after giving up on other non-voice based chat platforms (i’m looking at you AIM). It was so minimal but full featured.

  3. Om,

    “…but for now, let’s call it what it is. Microsoft bought and effectively killed Skype. ”

    Yeah but a LOT OF TIME passed between “Microsoft bought” and “killed Skype.” Microsoft did nurture it at first, long enough for it to, as you pointed out, kill the long-distance phone business. So it had a good life – 14 years with MSFT. The saddest part is that Teams, which is an abomination and a still-weak attempt to clone Slack, was sent to dispatch the victim.

    1. Dwight, respectfully I disagree. This one falls on Microsoft’s feet.

      They basically lied to Microsoft-ify Skype into an enterprise app and it really didn’t adapt to that market. They missed the point of Skype — Whatsapp has shown that non-enterprise can be a big market for communication apps. Look at what happens over WA in places like india and the African continent. It was Slack’s opportunity. The product line was managed by line cooks not chefs. Anyway, it is gone for now.

  4. Fantastic piece of journalism capturing the journey of a iconic brand not in hindsight but in tandem. This is so rare.

  5. It’s sad to see Skype go. I hope they at least keep it around in an archival fashion, i.e. letting users still log in and read their old chats.
    Now I just have to get my grandmother to install Discord, so we can keep in contact even though I moved hundreds of kilometres away from all of my family. And calling via traditional phone would be a bit too expensive in the long run.

    1. Discord is so terrible for humans who are not below 30 🙂 Quite noisy and confusing.

      1. My parents are both above 30 and they’ve managed it. And I know Discord well enough that I can help also, so it’s not too big of a problem. Also, Discord is basically the only option to switch to, because Teams is more business-oriented and WhatsApp’s desktop app is Window$-exclusive (and WINE-incompatible), which makes it unavailable to me and thus unsuitable.

        1. Fair enough. Telegram app is a good option — good desktop app too. I use that for non-essential calls, and is cross platform.

  6. In 2012 I was a new engineer at Microsoft working on a team that was working alongside the Skype team. I remember Skype had a lot of headwinds even back then. Memory is foggy but I think a big reason was Skype was relying on peer to peer technology which worked well in the 2000s with desktop computers but not for the mobile messaging boom that was ongoing. Concepts as simple as presence (green dot, red dot, offline, last seen, etc.) had the team scrambling to re-imagine how they should work in a world where people chat from their phones.

    I didn’t stick around. The usage was already underwhelming back then and was moving in the wrong direction while apps like Facebook and WhatsApp and iMessage had all the momentum. It didn’t feel like a good place to grow your career. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.

    1. Gretchen,

      Amazing to hear about the story from an inside perspective. It is ironic, because WhatsApp started in 2009, and Facetime in 2010. Skype folks I knew in Estonia and other locations had very clear ideas about as how to transition the service to a new mobile-first world, but were not really brought along. A lot of work done by the company was left to die on the vine, so to speak.

      The reality was Skype was blocked from working on mobile devices by carriers. Verizon, for example. my website has coverage of Skype. Back when we used blogs for covering news, I covered every sneeze about Skype.On the other hard, good to hear that you high-tailed it out of dodge and have found success elsewhere.

      Skype died the day the ink dried on the purchase agreement. And you are right, it is a surprise that it has lasted this long.

      1. Skype wasn’t really blocked by the telco’s as it LTE just couldn’t handle it at scale. I worked at Sprint as a System Design Eng (hardware) it was more of a limitation of LTE at the time before we upgraded into 400gig pipelines at the data centers even that was spotty as the cell towers fiber back-haul wasn’t antiquate.

        Funny enough we used a modified version of Skype for Business ourselves and when we converted to Teams it was enough of a disaster we switched to Slack during the T-Mo acquisition.

  7. Well, I’ve used Skype for tears, and am sad to see it go. Why? Because I still use Skype and, in early 2025, am now looking for a replacement software package. I suspect that Microsoft just made its ‘kill Skype’ decision based on the number of users, not in what Skype could become if they kept it. Oh, well, ‘onwards and sideways’ as an old friend used to mutter…

    1. John,

      Old habits die hard. But time to move on. WhatsApp, FaceTime and others such as Signal provide good options, even if they lack the familiarity.

    1. We all use Zoom, just for other reasons. FaceTime and WhatsApp is what we use to call our families.

  9. So is skype shutting down for good. I use it to chat with family members. When is the date it is supposed to shut down for good.

  10. Speaking as someone who had friends at Skype:

    One other thing that MS did was kill the stack. Skype was build with an all-open-source stack, which Microsoft at the time didn’t like. So they forced a rebuild using MS toolchain, which didn’t work.

  11. In 2005/6 I worked the Facebook <> Skype relationship. Pitched a very simple deal: add Skype presence & status to FB profile pages and syndicate FB identity to Skype. Would’ve allied eBay & FB and had any number of knock on effects. But alas Zuck decided his Millennial users had no interest in synchronous communication… and thus a deal died on a futon on University.

  12. Skype is how we met – writing up my LI and social posts now post-mortem, but I still don’t have my work on Skype on my resume. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Comments are closed.