Skype Is Officially Dead

FOX Business – Skype is no more, as Microsoft is retiring the once-popular video calling service on Monday.

Shutting down Skype will help the software giant focus on its homegrown Teams service by simplifying its communication offerings, Microsoft announced back in February.

To ease the transition from the platform, its users will be able to log into the free version of Teams using their existing credentials, with chats and contacts migrating automatically.

"Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and supporting countless meaningful moments, and we are honored to have been part of the journey," Jeff Tepper, Microsoft president of collaborative apps and platforms, said in a statement.

Those who do not want to use Microsoft Teams Free can export their Skype data. Those who do nothing will have their data deleted in January 2026, Microsoft's website says.

Skype first launched in 2003. When Microsoft acquired it in 2011 for $8.5 billion, the service had around 150 million monthly users. When the popularity of Zoom surged during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, that number had fallen to roughly 23 million.

The decline was partly because Skype's underlying technology was not suited for the smartphone era.

At the start of 2020, just a couple months before COVID went mainstream, as the world prepared to shut down completely, when businesses in almost every industry were scrambling to figure out how in the hell they were going to stay alive, Skype held a 32.4% market share in the one industry that was set to boom harder than anyone could have imagined. For over a decade leading up to the COVID epidemic, the term "video call" barely even existed. When you wanted to connect with someone over video, you "Skyped" them. You Skyped them even if you weren't using Skype. Skype dominated the video call industry so hard it reached Kleenex status. That should be the final boss of establishing yourself in an industry. When your brand is so powerful that its name is used in place of what the product... once you've reached that point, you shouldn't be able to fail. I don't care if it comes out that your CEO raped more people than Ghengis Khan and your Director of PR responds with a "They Had It Coming" campaign. When your brand name carries that much weight, it should truly be impossible to fuck that up. 

But somehow, someway, Skype managed to do it. It happened so fast. So fast you barely realized it happened. It's like one day we all woke up with the understanding that Zoom is now the socially agreed upon video call app of choice. As if the world's largest cell phone providers teamed up with Dr. Fauci, and through a combination of 5G and vaccines were able to infiltrate our brains and wipe the knowledge of Skype from our memory altogether. In one year, Skype's marketshare plummeted from a dominant 32.4%, all the way down to 6.6%. Meanwhile Zoom shot up to nearly 50%. I'm not sure there's ever been anything like it. 

Skypes downfall can be attributed to a lot of things. People came to find that Skype was far more prone to lagging and dropping calls than its competition. The audio quality of Zoom was far superior. Skype itself was built on a ridiculous amount of outdated code, which made making updates exceptionally difficult. They were slower to fix problems and make innovations than companies like Zoom and Google Meet who were built on newer platforms. The innovations Skype did make were widely disparaged by its users. People felt like the app had become weighed down by features nobody asked for, when all they wanted was for their calls to connect smoothly. Zoom ran better from a browser. By all accounts, Skype was the inferior product. In the end, the best product won.

To be fair, when people say Skype "totally fumbled the bag", I think it's a little bit misleading. I mean, they very much did. But it's not like their founders walked away with nothing. They sold to Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5 billion dollars. But Microsoft didn't have all their video call eggs in the failing Skype basket. Throughout Skype's demise, Microsoft Teams continued to grow. Zoom is still by far and away the video call platform of choice, but Microsoft Teams is still huge in the business world. If Microsoft didn't have Microsoft Teams, and had fully committed their resources to Skype, it's possible Skype would still be a major player in the industry today. Instead, they kept Skype around to be used primarily as a one-to-one personal video messenger. But it reached a point where Skype became such an afterthought, and so few people were using it, that Microsoft punted on it completely. Now if you go to Skype.com, this is the message you'll receive.

Although they remained separate products, in many ways Microsoft replaced Skype with Teams a long time ago. Not that they wouldn't have preferred to have both brands succeed in their own lane. They didn't spend $8.5 billion dollars on Skype with the plan to kill it off 14 years later. But Microsoft still has a relevant video conference platform for their customers to work with. Skype's founders are still billionaires. 

I'm not sure we've ever seen a company with a downfall like Skype. Not without some sort of scandal, or a shift in the market that rendered their product obsolete. To fail at a time where you were set up to succeed better than anyone, with nothing but your own incompetence to blame... that's almost impossible to do. It's like dropping the football on the 1-yard line before you cross into the end zone. Except that actually happens pretty frequently. That's unfair to Leon Lett, Desean Jackson, and Jonathan Taylor. At least they have some company. It's more like J.R. Smith getting an offensive rebound under the basket and running the wrong direction in the NBA Finals. They had the game won. All they had to do was take the ball up. Pretty sure he's the only one to do that

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Blog sources: Eleken, CNBC, Dexerto, FOX