Microsoft Skype Shutting Down: Microsoft is shutting down Skype, the video-calling service that it purchased for $8.5 billion in 2011, which contributed to the revolution in online communication. Microsoft Teams, the company’s flagship platform for video conferencing and team apps, will replace Skype in May, the tech giant announced on Friday. Teams will allow Skype users to connect in with their current accounts.
Teams has long been Microsoft’s top priority over Skype, and the company’s decision to discontinue the name indicates its aim to simplify its primary communications software in the face of numerous rivals.
Skype was a pioneer in making phone calls over the internet rather than landlines, having been founded in 2003 by a group of technologists in Tallinn, Estonia. It made use of voice over internet protocol, or VOIP, a technique that transforms audio into a digital signal that can be sent over the internet. After being acquired by internet retailer eBay in 2005, Skype introduced video calls.
“You no longer had to be a senior manager in a Fortune 500 company to have a good quality video call with someone else,” said Barbara Larson, a management professor at Northeastern University who studies the history of virtual and remote work. “It brought a lot of people around the world closer.”
Startups and non-business people alike benefited from the option to interact with distant colleagues without incurring costly international phone calls.
“You could suddenly have long calls, frequent calls, that were either free or very inexpensive,” Larson said.
When President Donald Trump’s administration used Skype to answer questions from reporters outside the White House press briefing room in 2017, it was still seen as high-tech.
A month later, Microsoft introduced Teams to meet the increasing demand for office chat services brought on by Slack Technologies, a startup competitor.
“Higher-quality media can deepen relationships and make people able to work through complex problems much better,” Larson said. “Suddenly, this was available to anyone with a decent internet connection. And that was the real sort of revolutionary role that Skype had.”
When Microsoft acquired Skype, it was investing in a program that had hundreds of millions of users and one billion downloads. At the time, Steve Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, declared, “Together we will create the future of real-time communications,” However, Skype was losing ground as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp gained traction.
Microsoft updated Skype in 2017, and several of its features closely resembled those of rival Snapchat. Users weren’t pleased. “People are annoyed by this update to the Skype app because it’s fixing something that was never broken to begin with,” Rachel Kaser, a reporter for The Next Web at the time, stated.
There were still rumours in June 2021 that Skype was about to go out of business. Microsoft Teams would be integrated by default when the company unveiled Windows 11, its new operating system, but Skype would not be for the first time in years.
During the Covid epidemic, Teams gained popularity as more people shifted their personal and professional encounters online. Microsoft released a blog post by Jeff Teper, the company’s head of collaborative products and platforms, in response to the announcement of Skype’s closure. He stated that the corporation wants to concentrate on Teams by streamlining its free services.
With Teams, users have access to many of the same core features they use in Skype, such as one-on-one calls and group calls, messaging, and file sharing,” he said.
“Additionally, Teams offers enhanced features like hosting meetings, managing calendars, and building and joining communities for free.”
According to the post, Skype users now have two options: export their Skype data, such as contacts, chat history, and call logs, or switch to Microsoft Teams. According to Microsoft, Skype users who purchase certain services will be able to continue using the service until their subsequent renewal time.
