I remember when Skype first came out, when I was a teenager. I called a random guy in Japan; he was learning English, I wanted to learn Japanese (as is tradition for teenage anime fans). It was a very kind series of calls, and we talked a bit about Japanese culture too. He taught me, rather patiently, how to pronounce certain basic words properly.
It’s a shame the service was treated like it has been. There was great potential in connecting people.Wherever you are, random Japanese dude I forgot the name of, konbanwa!!
They are not killing Skype, they just now bury the corpse. Skype died by malnutrion and bad parenting by MS a decade ago.
My feelings on this:
___Good! They could have cornered the market during Covid, but fumbled the ball.
The bigger headline is “Skype hasn’t been dead this whole time”
One of my clients is a small company that has been running with seven staff working from home, scattered around the globe, mostly rural. Since 1999. Everything has been held together by skype: chat, video, audio.
Should be interesting finding the right new workflow!
It’s amazing how they fumbled this. There was a time when video calls were Skype. Everybody was using Skype, everybody had it installed, people used it to chat and then … something happened. Microsoft did nothing. Or did the wrong kind of stuff. Software started to suck. And when the pandemic came, Zoom took over and nobody even tried to use Skype. That really, really are some bad business decisions there
It didn’t “start to suck”, they intentionally transitioned it, from old lean clients working over p2p usable in unbelievably bad connectivity conditions, to something server-based and fat laggy clients with typical Microsoft quality. They they turned off authentication servers for the old Skype.
If the old Skype were still functional today, nobody would say it sucks. OK, maybe no stickers and such.