Microsoft is reportedly killing Skype
Skype's days are numbered, as the Skype apps are now warning users that the service will be going away on May 5, and that existing users should migrate to Teams.
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Another company Microsoft bought and ran into the ground. It’s really incredible that they managed to get their lunch stolen. They had basically a monopoly and gave it away without a fight. Hell, the colloquialism for video calling someone was to Skype them for a looong time.
And then one small competitor comes along and it’s all gone. How can you fuck up this bad? Especially during the pandemic, in which they should have further entrenched their monopoly…
Was Skype really relevant when the pandemic hit? Nobody I knew used it anymore. And teams had mostly taken over for Skype for business by then as well.
My org used Skype For Business and it worked remarkably well. Much more lightweight, though somehow still a little less responsive than it should have been.
It has that "it just works" factor for video calling, whereas Teams almost needs a fucking checklist to rattle through if someone's audio or video feed isn't working.
Skype for business was not skype, it was lync, they just renamed it after the acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business
Yeah I've still got my headsets from boxes with Skype For Business branding that have "Compatible with Microsoft Lync" stickers on them.
It's probably closer in UI to Skype from the 2000s that the "real" Skype never really recaptured. Not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.
Skype for business is Skype in name only. It’s basically Office communicator with several name changes
Around these parts in the 2000s, MSN Messenger was what literally everyone used. Then Microsoft bought Skype and decided to shut down MSN Messenger. Then they also ruined Skype. Microsoft just can't do anything right despite making so much money. It's like they have no long term vision.
I would say this heavily depends on the region. In Germany, I knew nobody who used MSN, everyone only used ICQ.
That's why I said around these parts. Back then there was a lot more regional fragmentation.
Around my region, South America, everybody used MSN as well. We went through a phase of using Skype, but it was too resource heavy in comparison with MSN. Later on, people who needed voice chat for games played around with several different apps, until we finally settled with Discord back in 2016. Say all you want about Discord, but I've been using it for almost a decade at this point, and if your need is to have voice and text chat and easy screen sharing for gaming, it's basically the golden standard. The problem started when people started using it as a replacement for forums.
Man, I miss icq...
God it's like Gavin Fucking Belson at Hooli is running shit
Where I live, everyone used AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM for short. It was popular with teens because it offered chat rooms, but that meant it was also a popular hunting ground for predators. Nearly every terminally online teen from the late 90’s and early 2000’s has a story about getting groomed on AIM, by someone they initially thought was their own age.
Then Google Chat and Facebook Messenger came along, (and AOL’s subscriber count began to dwindle as people moved to broadband internet) and it was almost completely dead by 2010.
They intentionally killed it, when it wasn't theirs, it was a nuisance, when it was theirs, it wasn't a nuisance, but also not too useful.
It's about control, I think.
I mean, without Skype going bad would all these
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IMs, especially Telegram, become so popular?Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Yes, which makes me wonder on the old question if it's possible to create a distributed IM as prolific as bittorrent protocol.
In that last example they did something right. At some point I liked ed2k+kad and would swear at bittorrent for not incorporating search, reputation and such as basic components, but maybe that's what made torrents survive when other filesharing tools went out of common knowledge.
I'm going to think on this.
Lololol Skype was already dying when eBay fucked up. Hardcore revisionism here.
