Amazing how Skype went from a verb to the shadow realm. MS could've done so much more.
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Word on the street is that MS couldn't harvest the data they wanted out of Skype, even after turning off the encryption. So they let the Skype team keep on going because of reasons, while silently replacing them with teams.
Would seem almost intentional given the size and success of the company. How do you fuck something like that up so badly? Seems like one of those Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deals or similar
Skype was always shit. It was being first to market that made it popular. It was one of the first ways to get cheaper and free informational calling. By the time MS purchased it vent and ts became popular as well as zoom and others entering the space.
One of the things skype did first and best was decent noise filtering, transforming peoples shit audio equipment to something you could listen to for more than 5 minutes without going crazy.
For sure, Skype/eBay did a lot right at first. But by the time MS bought it, it was already falling from favor.
I miss vent, it was so clean
Mumble existed then, and still exists now. Vent was literally never clean, it was always bloated and behind.
(sorry, I'm very passionate about the Vent vs. Ts vs. Mumble debacle of the early aughts)
I agree with you here. They just never kept up with what people wanted or needed out of a communications platform. When Discord showed it was more versatile nearly 10 years ago, my whole group switched and never looked back.
Skype call sounds still bring specific kinds of nostalgia though.
They treated it as an extension of the telephone is how I always thought about it.
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Good ol capitalism breeding innovation. And then acquiring the innovation, cloning it poorly and killing it off so the market has no access to the product and service they wanted. Innovative!
Immigration Canada: "Prove to us that your marriage is genuine. Prove that it wasn't for immigration purposes."
My wife and I: "You sure you want that?"
Immigration Canada: "Make with the proof."
My wife and I: 400 pages, front and back, of Skype call logs/timestamps. A fucking literal ream of paper
I think they just wanted you to perform a verification fuck
I would
Me who dreads having to give her husband sex when she becomes a wife and hopes he'd pity her enough to not do it to her when she's clearly miserable and hates every second of it:
why in 3rd person?
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I don't want to say the country, but when I went with my wife for me to get residency via marriage, this is how it went.
Immigration Officer: Do you have any questions? Me: No Immigration Officer: Sign here and come back in a month with your passport to implement the visa Me: Uhh... That's it? OK Bye.
Ah yes, typical MS handling acquisitions. What a cancer of a company, metastasising everywhere and as much as you want to get better, it just won't dissappear. Antitrust oversight is a joke...
I’ve been using Skype for cheaper international calls to family that still relies on phones instead of video calls etc. I’ll need to check what happens with my credit. Any recommendations for an alternative?
I'm not a fan of Meta, but all of my international family rely heavily on WhatsApp.
It also seems that Signal supports VoIP calling, but I have not tried it.
Well, I have family that is old enough not to manage to use WhatsApp. They have a smartphone. WhatsApp is set up. I can never reach them on it.
Google Voice is good. I use it to call from the USA to Australia which is only $0.01/minute and doesn't have any monthly fees. You can see the rates here: https://voice.google.com/rates
I've got an Android phone and you can configure Google Voice so that it's automatically used whenever you make an international call from your phone's regular dialer.
It's a little contentious, but Discord is a solid video chat app. It's good for hop in/hop out for multiple users and you can have a dedicated family chat room on the server too. Very device compatible and resource friendly, and totally free.
I only have to use this occasionally, but on my android I use the app "Talkatone" to make free calls to phones. They have paid plans to keep your number, but I tend to just use new ones whenever one expires.
It might not suit your needs, but it's worked pretty reliably for me for the past 10 years or so.
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Dumbasses.
Teams has a lot of Skype references under the hood…
Well yeah “shutting down” here is more like “absorbed” into teams. They don’t make “enough” money from consumers to keep it going, but they do from their teams subscriptions. The tech is and will further be ported to teams and the branding changed.
yep, i was always under the assumption they bought it for parts to use in teams.
Wait.....MICROSOFT owns skype??? Was this always the case, or did they do something stupid where they bought skype during the heyday, and immediately tank it just a few years before the pandemic? Because Zoom really had a field day in 2020.
So, which is it? Did they always own it, or were they a buyer of an established skype that tanked it like Verizon did with tumblr? Or that other company did with myspace?
If I remember correctly MS bought it from eBay. And then promptly did their best job at taking a dump on it. Nothing MS did to Skype was good, disabled encryption by default, removed features, made the network so terrible that they actually make you consider teams. At one point Skype was the only game in town for personal web calls and chats, in the US at least. MS pissed that away, because killing competition and owning patents is more lucrative than creating good products and services.
Also forced people to use a Microsoft account to use it, and they definitely messed something up in the migration.
The biggest thing they did to kill it was banner ads in the client. The second those showed up, all my friends and myself instantly jumped to the new, fledgling Discord.
Which very quickly started to add the occasional banner and constantly push nitro. It fucking sucks.
Is there a defederated version which doesn't constantly drop quality and connection like discord does?
Matrix
They've owned it since 2011. When they did buy it, they had Lync, which sucked pretty bad. Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.
Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.
And the resulting horror show is just as bad as you'd imagine to :/
Buyer. 🤡
I remember a theory that the US government asked Microsoft to purchase Skype and change it from p2p to server-based, so that they could intercept decrypted communications.
Skype was originally made by a European company (Latvian?).
Ya know, as far as conspiracy theories go, this isn't hard to believe might be true. I could see that. I mean, I don't know either way what the truth is, but it's not like you're saying the moonlanding was actually first done by bigfoot, and it's kept under wraps to promote the cold war. See the difference is, I actually DO know about the bigfoot one. That's real. That happened. The government lies about bigfoot on the moon!
Where the fuck were you in 2011?
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Remember to break this news gently to your elderly parents.
Skype is what I usually use to video chat with them but I recently got my mom to download Signal, which is nice
Maybe bring back windows live messenger
I'm still sad they got rid of MSN Messenger in favour of Skype. MSN had superior video and audio quality.
I had so many international friends on MSN Messenger that I have no idea how to contact any more.
Well that sucks, I use it a lot but I will not use Teams.
That sucks. This is my main way of video-calling my family overseas. It's also gonna suck for people who use it for 2fa for US accounts (though I think most don't work with Skype and known voip numbers anymore so maybe not a huge deal).
It also sucks for those of us who need to call US numbers from overseas. I need to call a tax prep company and would rather not pay a fortune. Google also cracked down on those proven to be fully overseas with a voice number.
There are so many cheap voip services that give US numbers. Jmp.chat is the one I know but there's a lot.
Call your family on Whereby or Jitsi Meet. 10 years ago calling using a website could be a shock experience for non technical people, but by now I think everyone has used Zoom or MS Teams or something like that, so it should feel familiar.