The Disconnection of Skype

Long before Zoom became a catchword there was Skype and you can appreciate how valuable it was from what Microsoft paid to acquire it in 2011—US$ 8.5 billion. But all the money and headstart in the world is not enough to ensure dominance in a technological field because announcement has just been made that Skype will make its last call in May. Microsoft put up a blog saying: ’In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.’

Skype was launched in 2003 offering free calls over the internet. It doesn’t seem so revolutionary today but that was a time when network phone calls were expensive and international rates prohibitively so. Skype immediately became a success and that was evident in eBay acquiring it for US$ 2.5 billion two years later.

Its userbase has shrunk to just over 30 million now. Compare that number to the 300 million who are using Zoom. Skype also had 300 million at its peak in 2016 but it was the beginning of the end. As Wired wrote: ‘…but then the competition arrived thick and fast. As we turned to new tools like Slack, Zoom, WhatsApp calling, and Microsoft’s own Teams, Skype struggled to keep hold of its user base.’

When the pandemic came, videoconferencing got a terrific boost but it was the competitors who managed to capitalise on it. Skype was becoming a relic of the computer age unable to meld with the mobile phone era. Why would someone using WhatsApp take the trouble to install Skype all over again when they were anyway getting the ability to make video chats or group calls to anywhere in the world? Phones running on Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS already had those messaging platforms inbuilt into them. It might have been different if Microsoft had managed to carve a presence in mobiles but they were big players in the enterprise or business segment. Plus they also had their own Teams app doing the same thing. Those who are still using Skype or have paid for it will be transferred to Teams by Microsoft come May.  Skype’s meteoric rise and gradual demise again reaffirms the short shelf life of anything related to technology. No matter how impregnable they seem, the death knell could be waiting just round a corner that no one can see.

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