The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling that, based on personal experience, it is still used in place of FaceTime and other services, especially by older people.
It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much.
After it's marred, they didn't try to mend it much, and when it started to work well due to better bandwidth, they didn't push it back again. It fell to the wayside of "value-adds" all Windows software vendors love to put in the bag.
> "Oh you get the whole Office, great. There's some Skype for you, too. You know it doesn't work well, but it won't hurt to have it installed, no?"
So they blew their chances, badly. I personally don't like Microsoft, but they could have made me use it, if it worked well. Now I use Meet, which is again bundled with Google One, but it's web based and works much better. It also supports the nice features (noise cancelling, advanced backgrounds and whatnot) under Firefox, too.
Story in two headlines:
- “NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution” https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f... (2009)
- “Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?” https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ (2011)
WebRTC will happily set up a P2P video call with better encryption than the old Skype had if all you need is a 1-1 call without NAT traversal.
That part of your sentence is doing a lot of work. It has to be as easy as clicking on a contact for oldsters.
> had no idea how to manage a B2C product
What does this mean? MS has enough of b2c products. Windows is. Office is. Not enough?
You really think Windows (11, since anything older is gone) is a b2c product? It's free. It has advertisements. It has a data mining AI. You are not the customer. Windows is a b2b product.
You really think Office (365, since anything older is gone) is a b2c product? It's "free". It has advertisements. It has data mining AI. You are not the customer. Office is a b2b product.
Windows is not "free". Win 11 Home price is $120, upgrade to Pro is $100 [0].
0 - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=windows%2011%20home&ref=glow_cls
You got most of the tokens right, but windows is a paid product, try that with meta or google products and you got it.
https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/06/ebay_skype/
https://www.hugheshubbard.com/news/the-best-laid-m-a-plans-h...
The game shut down officially but the server leaked and became community ran. The original client was not very secure so hacking and cheating became common.
Out of nowhere comes Continuum, a ground up reimplementation of the Subspace client by none other than PrittK, completely eliminating any cheats but changing nothing of gameplay or UI.
He went on to co-own the largest server, Trench Wars, with another player named Dock. There he did custom game bots and other chat-tools. There were rumors that he was involved with Kazaa back then and later on I find out he goes on to be involved with Skype and Joost.
Continuum continued to grow and thrive. The backend server was eventually reimplemented into A Small Subspace Server (ASSS) so now this game was a complete user recreation of the original.
Well, minus the graphics which was in limbo from some sale to a third party company but they never had complaints. Then a few years ago we grt the game green lit on steam.
Little trek down memory lane.
Feels unconscionable today that I used to do that from paytv forums.
:)
ebay had Paypal. They had Skype. And Skype was a kind of social network.
eBay could have been Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, WYSE, but eBay always stayed, eBay.
I can't tell if their research pushes them to make the site continuously worse, or whether they just generally hate their users?
note: I've used it religiously since it launched
They were one of the very first websites that had to deal with humongous scaling issues, so I'm not saying they are stupid - just that, after a certain point in time, they probably ossified at a level that makes meaningful progress too difficult.
[1] https://www.nektra.com/main/2009/02/24/directsound-capture-u...
Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this? Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?
But it also indirectly damaged both variations.
Skype for Business became less of a “business” software like Lync was. So unlike Lync, which was fairly spartan but information dense, Skype for Business added a ton of white space, colors, icons, etc making it less efficient and less serious than Lync.
At the same time, Skype itself became purely consumer and went way down that route, focusing more on Temu like animation gimmicks than actually being a communication tool for friends and families.
I remember somebody saying "Micorosft is an amalgam of different power centers and dynamics. Some people inside genuinely loves open source and wants to be part of that, and some hate it like it's the evil itself. So, there's in-fighting and power struggles in many areas in Microsoft".
I think the comment came after a project manager personally gutted .NET Core's Hot Reload support to give closed source parts a boost, and things got very ugly both inside and outside of Microsoft.
(Including a partial update: <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update>)
It’s as if it doesn’t matter what project you pitch and what the fallout is as long as some KPI somewhere gets a boost. Just get your promotion and ride off into the sunset, someone else will deal with the aftermath.
Even if you're hiring a cross section of the population or a cross section of software developers or management professionals only a slice of it is gonna stick around long enough to influence the organization.
For example, you don't find a lot of Ron Swanson types working for insurance, the court system, or health and safety. Those personality types are either gonna find a new job, turn into a bitter shell of a person counting the days to retirement or go postal and finding a new job is obviously the superior option.
The comparison between Google and Microsoft (or whatever) is gonna be similar though the differences will be more nuanced. Same thing for big banks. Same for big oil. Same for big anything. You've got these differing corporate cultures and incentive sets and they select for different people.
(I think it was Paul Allen is who said it) "Microsoft is a corporation built upon the idea of intellectual property". So being closed source, aggressive safeguarding of IP and locking users in is the DNA of Microsoft.
Yes, company is made of people, but there's also a foundational DNA. When you keep that DNA alive, the company changes and eats the people fed into it, without evolving (See Apple, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.). Google's DNA has been changed from the top from a powerful but gentle giant to subtle but very evil giant.
Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
If your business is developing and selling software to businesses then you want a proprietary license and usually to give it away for non-commercial use. If your business is selling direct to consumer then you need a proprietary license, no source available, and probably DRM.
If your business is something unrelated to software, and uses software as a means rather than an end then OSS is your friend.
Google has many issues but I don't think technical competence is one of them.
Management by committees. Lots of office politics. Most senior execs have successfully failed upwards. Once every 18 months they let go of people they stick the blame on thereby losing any memory of design decisions.
I had a kid recently and have been putting less into my work, mostly just pushing back on asks and delegating because I don't have time.
All of a sudden I have senior management potential haha.
Feels like I'm living in the movie office space
I know Teams is fairly pervasive, but that's on the usual Microsoft Enterprise stranglehold, certainly not on Teams' merits or riding the popularity of Skype pre Microsoft.
Also, even if you just want to buy Teams, from what I've checked the barebones Teams only packages MS sells for smaller orgs are still cheaper than Slack. Actually, let's see... yeap, Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user, Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo, M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo.
I don't remember the last time I had a meeting on teams that didn't include a rant about teams
Yes. rivalry is at it's finest (and fiercest) when you're fighting your peer divisions inside the same company.
It's the management decisions to try to dramatically change or replace things that lands with lesser solutions in the end. Because the incentives and bonus structure are mostly screwed up in many of these companies.
Skype could have been the best, be all, end all solution for MS and brought everyone to their knees and just killed them. But it wasn't the first, or last time this would happen.
Pretty sure I flunked a system design question this reason. I was asked to design an online chat system. I asked of they wanted support for groups, they said no. So I gave them simple two way socket solution.
Apparently that wasn’t good enough, They wanted a full DB storing everyone’s conversations, that you could query, etc. I suspected it had nothing to do with any technical considerations. They just wanted that data.
History can be stored locally
Centralizing this just seems way more complicated to me, unless you want groups. Even then for small groups P2P isn’t such a terrible idea
Not sure what you mean by multidevice, I do t think they cared about mobile
Maybe; I think people forget how horrible Skype was on your phone battery when it was still P2P. The P2P-ness of it was definitely pretty cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the decreased battery.
> It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much.
Honestly I've been using Skype to talk to my parents ever since I moved out of my parents place in 2012, and for the last decade or so, it's been perfectly fine. I know it's kind of a meme to hate on it, but it never really was an issue for me.
For me at least, it made Skype with synonymous with trying to figure out the email and doing a password reset
In a world where the primary interface is a mobile phone, you can't just run a piece of software on a mobile phone. If you do that Skype will just be known as the app that completely destroys your battery randomly and for no seeming reason.
It happened all the time because booters were so popular and widely available, costing about $5/mo via paypal.
People were willing to put up with more delay (over p2p) to prevent having to trust each person that joins the TS.
Skype transitioned away from p2p because mobile phones were not very powerful and they needed a lot of supernodes.
First desktop apps were the supernodes, then it turned into centralized servers entirely.
So my grandma used charbon (coke) when she was a kid. And my mom uses charbon (charcoal) for her barbecue.
In journals and scientific papers the words coke will be used.
In everyday speech, coke means cocaine. Coca is short form for coca cola. And cola is the generic for a coca cola flavored soda.
I admittedly used a very rare/specialist example homonym. What I'm really wondering is how context plays into it. If you're ordering drinks in France and an English speaker says they'll have a Coke, does anyone really think they are referring to cocaine? Coke is vernacular slang for cocaine in American English too, but no one confuses this with usage of the brand name to refer to soft drinks (specifically Coca-Cola, or to soft drinks in general, which is a regional thing).
Fun aside, coca cola/cola is male. Cocaïne is female. A rail (of coke) is male.
That's also called "coke", which is why there's a Tintin book called "Coke en Stock". [0]
That said, if you say "coke" in English, almost nobody will think of fuel, and the same is true for French speakers today.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Aventures-Tintin-Stock-French-Sharks/...
There's a button saying "58 languages" on the trailing edge of where the title of the page is. It opens a drop-down with language selection.
(Presumably the UI is different on mobile, speaking about web.)
Although what I really wanted was a Pepsi, but she wouldn't give it to me. All I wanted was a Pepsi! AND SHE WOULDN'T GIVE IT TO ME!
Sure, it's nice to brand the verb, but when the product behind it is EOL, why bother.
Having said that, Zoom is an absolutely terrible product. The backdoor they installed in Macs for example and then when it was brought to light refused to remove it until Apple was forced to blacklist the application. They're either incompetent or evil.
I'd say both.
Skype achieved perfection a year or two after the Microsoft acquisition. At that point they should have downsized the team and focused on maintenance. Instead, they kept releasing new versions, each new version being worse than the previous one.
However with shift to mobile the patterns changed and less people ran it on desktops, thus less supernodes and the p2p approach had limitations (no group call) where solutions were needed.
For example, Tox is a fully decentralized P2P messenger and it is not widely popular.
Is there a security whitepaper for it?
Maybe microsoft forgot they made that?
They're so cheap. Just put a quota on total storage or something, that actually map to their costs..
We have a Slack for a shared office of 10 people or so, we use it to like ask each other for where to go for lunch or general stuff, it must cost them $0.001/month to host, but you continuously get a banner that says PAY TO UNLOCK THESE EXCITING OLD MESSAGES all over it, and when you check what they want, they want some exorbitant amount like $10/month/user so $100/month for a lunch-synchronization tool. For $100/month I can store like 5 TB on S3, that's a lot of texts.
I'm genuinely curious why they don't have some other payment option, I'd be happy to pay $1/month/user for some basic level if they just don't want freeloaders there. Well, I wouldn't be happy.. but still :)
Nothing is as frustrating as looking for an old conversation referenced in a doc and being smugly told by some corporate dick that Slack isn't for documentation and if it were important info, clearly someone should have saved it. Never mind who, it should just magically happen.
The gap between "messages last for 30 days" and "Slack keeps a searchable record of all your business decisions in a useful way, forever" is huge. I can pretty easily see the value of the latter but it seems to freak executives out for some reason...
I find that this take is much more common among managers and executives who are used to being spoon-fed documentation than among the engineers who actually have to write and hunt for it.
That doesn't track with my experience as a user at all. Almost every day I do a search that returns results older than a year.
EDIT: Oh, this subthread is about slack.
I do think Slack's permissions model is better suited to business use than Discord's.
Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user
Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo
M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo
I didn't understand all the hate until a few groups tried pushing the actual "teams" inside "Teams", and goddamn they are bad. They're an awkward and confusing mashup of chat rooms and forums, with conversations spread across different levels and constructs that each receive different levels of UI focus.
But the mess of sharepoint/o365 opened in wrappers inside of teams for the teams and it's just a hot mess that makes me angry when the UI is so different.
It's pretty common in the dinosaurs like Microsoft. Kodak for example had working digital cameras very early on, but didn't do anything with them because they didn't want to cannibalize their film business.
Give a suit a KPI, and they're gonna optimize for that KPI.
If you are talking non-business free users then sure, Zoom comes out on top.
They missed the huge opportunity way before on mobile and in gaming, that's when WhatsApp and Discord stepped in and destroyed Skype.
I’m more apt to agree to a Skype type setting than someone saying let’s setup a teams meet or I’ll message you on teams.
I am aware a Skype meeting and a teams meeting is essentially the same thing now, it’s just a bias in my mind.
But, of course: thank god they blow it every time. They bring the spotlight to the places where others create good things.
Since then, I had forgotten it even existed: "Microsoft is killing Skype? Wasn't it dead yet?"
Personally, I don't really love any of them... I miss the simpler UI/UX of Instant Messenger apps or Trillian/Pidgin etc. Aside, just looked at Trillian and looks like they did a nice spin on their business model.
But MS and good product naming, well...
When it's bundled with O365 and shares admin tools, accounts etc, there's no wonder companies pick it.
I don't know anyone who uses it outside of work.
Wasn't too bad when most were under ICQ, AIM or Yahoo messenger... but after FB, Google and MS got in the mix it just went to hell mostly. Still is. I mean I have half a dozen messenger apps on my phone each with half a dozen contacts that thing $FOO messenger is better for privacy/comms/etc.
They just decided they like teams more then skype
IMO this hasn’t been true since 2020.
They grew Teams, lol.
Zoom - wtf, who the hell uses it after.
Discord would be better example since it is huge, even LLVM community uses it
My dream service would be very like discord but with scheduled meeting support and completely open source and self hostable.
It was pre-cloud in every aspect, not only using P2P for actual VoIP traffic but also for contact list management and node discovery (via DHT and promoting random people's PCs to act as core nodes! Opening up Wireshark on my laptop when on fast university Wi-Fi with a public, unfirewalled IP was quite the experience).
It was also available literally everywhere: Linux, the Sony PSP, Nokia's Linux-based "internet appliance/tablet" series, Symbian smartphones, cordless landline phones in some countries...
I've long since moved on, but I do have some very fond memories of it being a lifeline to friends and family when backpacking and studying abroad in a time of horrendously expensive international/roaming calls.
Rest in peace!
P2P was such an interesting part of internet history. It's a shame client-server prevailed over it.
Decentralized systems are so much more liberating. It felt like being a part of something rather than being a serf in someone's platform.
I think it's only the WWW that went from wickedly good to sour and evil. The P2P world is just as good as it used to be, just not as force-fed and loud as the unhinged hellscape that is Web 2.0. If you look, you will probably find whatever you're looking for with just a DHT link.
Social networks tend to be pretty difficult in p2p systems since the amount of traffic usually scales exponentially with network size (as posts get published to followers and shared over and over by the users of the network), which you’d want to maximize
Say I have 100 followers and each of them have 100 followers.
Then say I make a post and all of my followers repost it.
That’s an explosion of updates that need to be sent around for 101 interactions.
These major social media platforms handle millions of interactions per second with accounts that have millions of followers and posts that get hundreds of thousands of reposts.
When there’s a centralized system, it’s easier to make sure everyone gets all their posts. Very little need to propagate every single update across every node in your whole network. From a user standpoint it’s seamless as well
It’s nothing unsolvable, but it’s much harder than a centralized social media platform while providing no visible benefit for the average, non technical, user.
Also, multiple levels of nat are unfortunately common and make STUN unreliable
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini
I remember Bill Venners used to write about it on his site artima.com .
I remember trying to run SkypeKit on my Kindle. Didn’t get it to make calls, but I think it received chat messages!
Abuse of the law to buy a competitor, form a monopoly, and then price fix an entire market. It sounds cute when you say "hug of death" almost like they didn't intentionally seek out this precise outcome.
> It was also available literally everywhere
Funny how that was literally the first thing to get the axe. I guess some "hugs" are like that, huh?
> Rest in peace!
Justice for Skype!
So no, there was never a monopoly, the market share was vastly too low to “price fix an entire market,” and “the hug of death” certainly doesn’t mean making a product better and more used and only shuttering it after 14 years when it’s been vastly outclassed (Skype usage sits at around 1%, and Zoom completely slaughtered it). Most tech fails much quicker.
On Hacker News of all places what I think gets lost in the monopoly conversation is that it's not just the consumer market you need to pay attention it's the _labor_ market. I always assumed that would more be more readily apparent here. I am often surprised to find out it is not.
In a corporate setting? "We already have Microsoft accounts for all of our users, do you want us to maintain a separate user list? No way. Teams may be bad, but it's not bad enough to warrant that."
What is better than Teams? I don't love Teams, but it's light years beyond what Zoom provides, and the services that Amazon and Google offer were pretty garbage last time I checked.
I also really like Slacks huddles and Discord VC's (we treated them like conference rooms).
They are working hard now on the Extinguish phase. Linux was set back by systemd and wayland. And what's left of it is available as WSL.
Microsoft was not fast moving enough to keep Skype at its prime.
A year or so ago I found this to be impossible, there was no application for desktop that was as simple as receiving a phone call. My father has no smart phone. I sent him a zoom link via email but he couldn't log on to the family computer without getting blasted with UI updates, terms of service changes, "Do you want to use OneDrive?", "Here's what's new in Chrome", "Try asking Copilot anything!", etc. From his perspective the computer never worked the same way twice. I wish we had regulations that prevented buying out competition.
EDIT: I just found that logmein actually offer a personal product again, named GoToMyPC, but what used to be entirely free at the time, is now priced at $35/month.
I 'member this being advertized on TechTV back in The Day. It's interesting to see the focus on PDAs now that the product category is entirely dead: https://web.archive.org/web/20031209031959/http://www.techtv...
…but didn't realize it's quite as old as it is (1998) and had never heard of “ExpertCity”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoToMyPC
In the context of screen sharing, I guess smartphones are the evolution of what they meant by "Pocket PC". Sure, the mobile remote desktop use-case is a little niche, but the product class isn't dead, it was just reinvented.
The value prop for the proprietary services like TeamViewer for me is they work much better over poor connections and cross platform. (Are there any decent RDP servers for Mac/Linux? In any case it’s another thing to have to install.)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/solve-pc-problem...
FaceTime is about as seamless an experience as you can get, and it's basically like receiving a phone call because it's indeed a call on a phone!
Unusable!
About Skype: Once upon a time I had a phonecall with my then almost 70 retired mother from abroad, who never been a tech-savvy person, to be gentle, saying we should try Skype for its video chat, better sound and its no/low cost. I will install it next time being home. Next day she called me on Skype! She used the link I sent (she is not speaking English btw.), installed, configured, looked me up and called me out of the blue. Did not happen similar before or ever since. Soon, I will have trouble getting through the typical user experience, well, more like not giving an f getting through it.
[1] https://img.ifunny.co/images/5e047ed0fb02df4c206c9d836ed21c8...
And in [1] they missed the "Try closing the 'Disable ad-blocker plugin' pop-up"
Also, I wouldn't exactly call Qt native, unless you happen to be on KDE.
The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.
I'm generally a big fan of Joel Spolsky, but in retrospect, I think this advice is just wrong, and I think Skype is a perfect counterpoint. That is, sometimes a rewrite is a horrible idea, but at the same time sometimes not doing a rewrite is a horrible idea. If making changes to the code becomes such a nightmare that your rate of progress is much less than your competitors, you're going to lose.
While there is still some good advice in that blog post, hard-and-fast rules are rarely correct. Most things in engineering are tradeoffs, and it's tough to know sometimes what the right balance is.
We live in a world with WebRTC, embedded agents and digital telephony. The platforms, OSes, infrastructure are so different from how they were in 2009. Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more?
What I don't get is how MS couldn't use the Teams stack to power Skype as a consumer brand. Probably there was some effort but something got in the way. It might even have been a cultural barrier - Skype was an acquisition, and acquired codebases generally fossilise
Yes, if it is less bloated than Electron-based. See Jami, which is a native app and it's distributed and open source.
Along with the Skype code, the Skype brand was also thrown in the trash. You could question that decision—perhaps keeping both brands for different target demographics would have been a better move. Teams could be for work and business, while Skype (powered by Teams' code) could remain for regular consumers. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s better to strengthen a single brand rather than maintain two separate products.
That said, I do have an issue with the name Teams—it doesn’t quite fit the use case of calling your grandma overseas.
Totally agree about the brand fumble. I think Teams is the least known/used brand by consumers, but honestly maybe these days that really doesn't matter that much from a money-making perspective.
They are still building on it. For some reason, noone at Microsoft has any idea how the final product shall look like, so they are changing the UI/UX every couple of months.
After smartphones took off, management was reluctant to ditch P2P and move to a client-server model, for both business (running servers costs money, and remember Skype mostly made money on calling PSTN) and technical reasons (P2P was at the heart of Skype). Internally, engineers had Skype working "in the cloud", but it took years of waffling (middle management was distracted by the introduction of Scrum; don't get me started about that; upper management was distracted by the company getting bought and sold twice) before slowly turning around the big ship.
By then, the A/V part of the tech had become commoditized, and plenty of free alternatives (namely FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat) had appeared on the scene, with better business models. No amount of rewriting code and building from scratch addressed that latter part. Management was very interested in finding new ways of making money, but it was also (for better or worse) very reluctant and careful in introducing ads into the UI.
I'm surprised that you are surprised!
Rewriting a million-lines-of-code project from scratch without the stupid bits is easy. Getting the equivalent of the working bits, instead...
Joel expressed this concept quite well already 25 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Yes, it's absolutely true getting the working bits correct is hard, by consigning yourself to a slow death doesn't seem like much of an improvement.
It got replaced by Teams.
Of course, as we see here, not doing anything had the same effect in the end...
I am not.
The brand is strong in a negative way, I have never met anyone who ever liked Skype.
You can argue that they could have been Zoom, too, but looking at Zoom's 22bn market capitalization I don't think Microsoft sheds many tears about that thought. It's more a testament to the incredible market power and distribution muscle Microsoft has, that they can afford this many bad decisions and still win in a way.
People will say the same thing about Slack, email, and any other messaging system they are forced to use. People love to complain, especially if they're coming to a product after using a different one at a previous job.
Are there any alternatives to get a real U.S. phone number that will work in another country for long periods (AFAIK, many providers require the phone to connect to a local cellular network periodically)?
Edit: In case it wasn't apparent, I'm not physically in the U.S.
Unfortunately, I went so long without actually using it that they took my number away (my fault because they did send me a warning but I just forgot about it). Now I'm in the same boat as you as I had switched to a Skype Number after that.
But Google Voice is a decent free option to consider if there's someone in the US who could help you with initial activation. Until Google finally decides to kill it, at least. I'm frankly surprised that Microsoft killed Skype before Google killed Voice.
When they semi-killed hangouts a couple years ago I thought for sure Gvoice was gone.
Development seems to have (relatively) picked up recently. There was a period of about five years when I don't think there were any publicly announced developments. Now we'll get maybe one a year or so.
contorting to keep it off management's radar, explain away any foibles, redirecting minor funds to get maintenance and tech debt paid off just enough to work another year, someone's going to write that tech story some time.
Even if it's fictional it will be a good read.
It mostly works flawlessly. It's cool that you can use wifi calling when abroad and the POTS network domestically, all transparently from the POV of the person calling you.
I have noticed that some services (Square, Venmo, and Ticketmaster come to mind) don't like sending 2FA texts to VoIP numbers. I end up needing to use whatever SIM I have at the time or a relative's number for those, and I'm low key anxious I'll be locked out of my account someday.
I guess, provider will always consider your country where the phone number is located. Funny thing, while I'm roaming, my IP address will always be Lithuanian. It does not matter where the world I'm currently staying.
I have fond memories of using skype to contact my friends and family circa-2011 when I was working for Nokia in Finland.
Ironically, microsoft killed nokia the same way microsoft killed skype, an acquisition and then strangulation.
if nothing else, it’s at least two times the european tech sector was actively harmed by US tech giants… which isn’t much, but weird that it happened twice.
nokia did that to themselves, microsoft aquisition just prolonged its inevitable ends
Just like with Zune, it was not part of MS strategy and therefor dropped. You need to keep working on something like this for years to make it successful. Large companies though drop products that are not a huge success after two years, associated with such products is a career killer.
[Edit] I got the Lumia to decide as a CTO at that time if we would go into Windows phones or not. I asked for more Lumias and XBox (to show cross plattform eCommerce) from MS to evangelize inside the company, but was let hung dry. So we did not support Windows phones. They never went full in.
(Former Touch Diamond user here.)
Then again arm doesn't seem to be necessary when looking at AMDs APU offerings. It was just a decade of intel struggling with their fabs.
I also have one of the new AMD 300 AI platforms, and it still can’t do power right. Either the laptop is miserably slow on battery, or runs way too hot on power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
https://web.archive.org/web/20090112172352/http://research.m...
https://read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs261-f11/singul...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180228191626/https://archive.c...
I think this is about company culture as a whole too, MS only know how to make software
this is same problem with google too, with pixel device is very underwhelming success given how many resource they have
the Board and Shareholder knew that it was sinking ships so it want cashout to Microsoft at least before its going to rubble
Also makes the choice for Microsoft, as opposed to anyone else, very understandable. The other choice that "worked" for cell phone companies was to be a Chinese company, with state subsidies amounting to zero, maybe even negative tax, no environmental regulations at all (my favorite whoopsie was an algae bloom that started inside China and reached 1/4th to 1/3rd the way from China to the US. It is terrifying to think about just how many fish, animals and plants must have suffocated when that happened), plus definitely using WAY cheaper labor, maybe even using slave labor.
the simple reason they die is because they sucks, that's just it. HN user just overthinking this simple reason the CONSUMER want
user just want something that's good, that's why nokia and blackberry die not because they got killed by another big corpo, but because they can't adapt
And even that wouldn't have necessarily killed them, if they had adapted quickly to make this new kind of phone. But instead they made the Blackberry Storm as a "hey we can do this touchscreen thing too", but crippled it by giving it a resistive touchscreen which was incredibly unpleasant to use relative to the competition. And iirc they still insisted on tying it to BES, even though their competitors offered an email experience which Just Worked without having to use RIM's server. It seemed (from the outside to be fair) like RIM refused to recognize that the competition had blown them out of the water, so instead of pivoting to catch up they doggedly tried to offer "what we had before, but with grudging minimal concessions to the things our customers want". But that was never going to work, because customers had never liked their original model to begin with. They liked what it enabled for them, but once competitors could offer the same benefits with a more pleasant to use interface, it was over for that model.
Yes, most acquirers bungle the acquisition (regardless of nationality), but the reason these companies decide to sell in the first place is because their future prospects on their own don’t look great.
Skype was a consumer success but consumers violently hate paying for software (just read HN).
The market for video calls-as-a-business is entirely B2B. Skype with their fun whimsical branding and non-sales dominant culture couldn’t hack it. Plus, big dumb enterprises hate screening new vendors, so Microsoft/Cisco/etc were always going to win that space.
Zoom basically swooped in later able to take all the learnings from Skype and go B2B from the start.
Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
n=1 and all, but I've heard similar stories. European tech companies have very different cultures and ways of making money, shaped by our laws and consumer expectations.
Skype, for example, was used as a pay phone and a simple messaging app before Microsoft bought it. You put in a euro, and you call and message your friends. It mutated into a bloated Microsoft Live app with several different front-ends, including some integrations with Office and various subscription services that sold the same thing in multiple ways. Core features stopped working, too. I'm sure someone liked the Frankenstein monster that it became (I don't kink-shame sadists), but most of the original users, and especially Europeans, did not.
If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype except for taking out a competitor, I'd say the decline would have been the result of managerial incompetence and American managers' lack of understanding of Europe. But of course, once a competitor bought Skype, there was no reason for it to exist anymore, so perhaps that is the reason it died.
Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
They too didn't understand our culture. They completely ignored the parts of our business that were scalable and taking off, and focused instead on nebulous "synergies". They actually seemed more interested in us taking on their branding than what we actually did. They'd push down demands to chase some latest trends but when we needed something back from them they struggled to give us the time of day.
They also immediately tried to give pay cuts and force immediate redundancies and seemed shocked to discover they couldn't legally do that. So instead they had to polite request that people in our company take a pay cut. I only know of one person naive enough to take them up on that offer.
I left a few years post acquisition, it was clear things would not get better we were just left rudderless because we'd previously been run by the founder for ~25 years and now were run by no-one with no direction.
Most acquisitions don’t turn into YouTube or WhatsApp/Instagram-level success for the acquirer. The academic literature on CEOs empire building via acquisition is that most of the time it’s value destructive.
I love a good US vs Europe debate but acquisitions aren’t an area where either corporate culture excels. European acquirers are equally as careless with their gobbled up playthings.
Knew a developer who worked there.
Day 1 of aquisition - there were 4 layers of managers between him and Steve Ballmer.
A year later there were 8. Tjis is how much bureaucracy and managers MS added in only one year
Yup, that's also my experience. Americans are just like the unofficial President - they don't take "no" for an answer when they demand something, no matter what, unless you manage to get court judgements because that actually threatens the bottom line.
> Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
I always remember when Wal-Mart tried to come to Germany... and had to leave with its tail tucked in because they just couldn't cope with stuff being done differently here [1].
[1] https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-...
Do they still do this to this day? This is definitely an -ism of the early 2010's but I figured corporate stopped pretending that "we're family" by the close of the decade.
The smiling argument makes perfect sense. I hear several EU countries simply have a more blunt approach and pretty neutral mannerisms towards strangers. Americans would call the approach "cold", so there's definitely a cultral difference.
Yeah. To put it blunt: When I want to get smiled at, I either woo a partner or go to a brothel.
That sure is a funny way to refer to a president who was elected by both the popular vote and the Electoral College. I'm no fan of Trump, but it sounds like a form of derangement syndrome to believe that he wasn't democratically elected.
̶Y̶o̶u̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶n̶ ̶T̶r̶u̶m̶p̶?̶ ̶H̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶v̶o̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶h̶i̶m̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶a̶s̶h̶a̶m̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶f̶o̶r̶t̶u̶n̶a̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶.̶
Edit: Parent more than likely meant Musk as replies to this comment explained, I should have figured that out but it's too late or early or some other excuse.
But it is hard to tell. They are cut from he same cloth after all, simply separated by a generation of figuring out how to squeeze more out of their labor.
That's the official 1.
GP probably meant the immigrant billionaire standing next to him all the time, who can't even bother to dress properly to meet with (arguably) some of the most important people in your country, aka Elon Musk.
Yes, it was used as a backdoor to scrap user data when the computer was not in use. That's why i uninstalled it.
I guess one could call it leadership stagnation, but I would argue more it being just plain old stupidity
What? None of those were EU government owned, all was private. Do people really have this sort of (completely incorrect) view on how things work in Europe? Not even donald was ever stating such ridiculous things
Stagnation and risk averseness is pretty much the default when it comes to most major European companies. In almost any sector.
And the claim of parent that income from sales would go to EU, which is not true, it went to Nokia owners who aren't in any meaning 'EU'. Its like saying any sale of any US private company to some foreign one goes to trump and his government.
Your post is typical lazy propagation of trivially verifiable made up claims, not sure even by whom or for what purpose, but this forum has higher standards
Yes, risk aversion.
Of course there are highly innovative and successful companies in Europe, but they are usually highly specialized or an exception to the rule.
It wasn’t always the case of course, but the last ~15 years or so have been a disaster.
> verifiable made up claims
Well yes, it’s rather easily verifiable. The biggest “tech” company in the EU is SAP after all.
It’s a but confusing is your comment supposed to be sarcasm? Otherwise how exactly are my claims “made up”?
> would go to EU, which is not true, it went to Nokia owners who aren't in any meaning 'EU
It’s very obvious that they didn’t mean that especially if you read what they said next. Not sure how one can misinterpret it.
There was a time when whole companies were on Skype the way they're now on Slack.
It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged it.
When we made the jump to Slack in early 2014, we migrated as much of our Skype history as we could, which was _a project_, but again, mostly worked.
It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged a lot of products. It genuinely makes me think they're aware of it at this point.
they don't even manage it, like they just let it "stay" that way
I think this is the problem with Trillion dollar company, they don't want focus on "small money" problem and they can just buy tech/company if they find it important enough in the future
Also, Skype has an official Linux client.
Instead of developing Teams (NIH at its best), they could have carefully developed Skype into a similar platform. But I'm not sure a giant like Microsoft is capable of something like this. But at least their 8.5bn investment wouldn't have been just to kill a competitor.
It was actually technically impressive, just...why??
How do you know?
Teams feel totally different from Skype, from design perspective
They never were at all related to Skype which was based around p2p phone calls, not group chats or businesses.
Genuine question, what do people here recommend as a replacement for non-technical people? I'll need to walk my grandmother through the process of setting something remotely.
No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out, and I'd need something that can run on a computer. I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.
I gifted a MacBook, iPhone and Apple Watch to my elderly father, and I now use FaceTime. He came from a PC and is not technical, but he adapted fairly easily. (The fall detection feature on the watch gives us both some peace of mind.)
So FaceTime lets you make a link that you can give to someone with a web browser and they can use it to reach you, and it works pretty well. You might just try it.
> I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.
That's probably the biggest limitation: It's a webpage for calling you (the person with the iPhone), not a page for you to call them. If you want them to open a app/page when they are available, I think Messenger is best in terms of features and usability.
If your parents/grandmother aren't already on WhatsApp I don't think you should link their phone number (which might be linked to their banking etc) with a public chat system because there are a _lot_ of online scams targeting the elderly through WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and linking to the mobile number associated with other (higher value) services. It is very easy to lock-down Messenger so nobody who isn't already a friend can't target them.
I hadn't really thought about scams. I'll keep that in mind.
Mac users can call others. Others cannot call Mac.
Yes, FaceTime requires that the Apple user initiate.
> It's a regular (persistent but revokable) link
You are correct that you can save the link somewhere for future use.
My customer clicks the link whenever they want, and my phone rings like any other FaceTime call with the label I have given that link in my phone.
That's what I think most people want and mean by "initiate", and so I think it misleading at-best to suggest the customer (non-apple user) is unable to initiate the call.
> You are correct
And this is the first correct thing you have said.
I coordinated with my parents, we're gonna try the free Teams thing.
She’s also in Iran, so it’s one of the only services that somehow the govt doesn’t target when killing video call apps.
Discord probably has a bit more going on since it also has a community focus, but it may be worth looking into since it's a platform that won't be going away anytime soon. It also works from the browser if having them download something is a headache.
Wouldn't need to set up anything. And works as reliably as anything I've seen.
EDIT: Signal is a very HN recommendation for drop dead simplicity. Syncing keys?
I might see if I can just migrate her to the free Teams service from MS. It hurts me a little as an annoying Linux guy but I think this would be the easiest option.
That's likely what we'll end up using since I've already onboarded my mom and my dad on this.
It's a pain to deal with syncing issues on Signal Desktop.
I’m surprised, in some ways, that it took almost 15 years for it to die. If Microsoft absorbed the Skype tech in 1 year and rebranded/reskinned Live Messenger to look like Skype, they could have been done with it in 2012.
Now, they are retiring Live Messenger and Skype. Two technologies have become zero. It is interesting that they chose to go this way.
It did! It was some impressively cool tech too. At the time, at least in my country, some ISPs would disable your internet access when you didn't pay, but the LAN between subscribers still worked. So obviously nothing worked, except Skype. My theory then was that it would find a path to route around the disconnection by having the Skype client of a different subscriber on the same LAN, that did have internet access, relay your traffic to the rest of the network.
Group chats in Skype though, those were popular. Nothing else had good group chats at the time, but then again, after VK introduced them, everyone I know quickly moved there. I don't know how message delivery worked there, but you could receive messages that were sent while you were offline just fine. Maybe you got them from any one online participant, or maybe the "supernodes" did some sort of store-and-forward thing, or maybe a bit of both.
But when communicating with family or with business contacts Skype was the main way, incl. when it came to instant messaging.
I think they really tried to merge Skype with Live Messenger, stripping Skype for parts. And maybe those parts weren't the tech as much as the brand, but we don't know how much tech they adopted.
https://www.macstories.net/iphone/microsoft-releases-windows...
What’s a good alternative here? I just want to make outgoing international calls cheaply.
From a bit of Googling, Viber may be a reasonable alternative. They're owned by a reasonably non-shady/non-fly-by-night operation (Rakuten), have a desktop app, and let you buy credit without a subscription: https://account.viber.com/en/rates-index
Happy to hear about experiences with alternatives.
I know you can do sms messages, but I'm not sure about calls.
Perhaps an old Android phone could be used for this?
I guess MS-internal politics? They had their own Teams and that was the preferred product?
That is why there are now Webview2 usage all over the place, and after 5 years WinUI 3.0 is still behind the WinForms, WPF and even MFC development experience, even though it should have been a plain port of UWP/WinUI 2.0 into standard Win32 infrastructure, so adding almost another 10 years on top (WinRT platform came out in 2012).
EDIT: it was actually 2012, not 2014.
Teams used to use Angular 1 and I think they are still migrating out of it. Microsoft would need to pay me a lot of money to want to dive into that mess. I imagine there are a lot of devs who would love to be VSCode core developers though.
I really don't know what the Teams team does all day long.
I imagine the Teams project gets a lot of pressure to deliver features instead of fixing the underlying problems. While the VSCode project probably only occasionally gets a push from upper management (like to add copilot stuff)
Delivering features on top of an unmaintainable mess just makes the mess bigger.
Afaik Skype was a buggy mess and thereby not a good foundation for development, and very much had a reputation of being software for consumers, not businesses, so not a good foundation to make money.
Microsoft meanwhile is a corporate powerhouse, not a consumer powerhouse. Most of its profits are from corporate software and servers.
So it made sense that they developed MS Teams as a corporate product for their Office product range.
It's closing in on half a billion users and its annual (!) revenue already exceeds the purchase price of Skype. 90% of fortune 100 companies use it, and I think it's the go-to product for virtually all corporates that run on PC/Windows.
Not doing this sooner (14 years ago) is where they definitely dropped the ball. But during covid? I think MS completely nailed it with a hugely succesful rollout of an integrated tech in MS Teams.
Whenever I reboot my computer, Skype installs an update.
Even with Skype they rebuilt the entire backend as well when they moved it from a decentralized platform to a centralized platform.
I struggle to believe that this theory holds any water.
It also lends support to an old conspiracy theory that the primary driver for Microsoft buying Skype was so that the service could be centralized so that communications could be monitored and intercepted.
Ironically, I think this list includes Teams.
(if strings, binary layout and even some subprocess names are to be believed)
1 to buy the users
2 to reign in an upstart empire
3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand
4 to be able to peddle 'Lync'
They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly; they changed skype from something to chase and desire, to something to avoid :-/.
A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync, which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product. As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'.
It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to.
For a range of years, the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other..
/s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call..
/s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service
- "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices",
"you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",.
So, skype going from 'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to 'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!'
Enshittification galore.
It's not their first time at taking our unused money, sorry credits
Also, my Skype credit simply disappeared from the account (granted, it had been sitting idle for a few years, but still).
WhatsApp, Signal and similar apps completely replaced Skype, which stopped innovating years ago. Other than some "automatic captioning" based on Bing, and interface changes that are annoying for computer-illiterate people, barely anything changed.
For several years, Skype had been a very lightweight way to communicate with people with not-so-good computers and flaky Internet connection. Trying to replace it with Jitsi, for instance, quickly shows how much more CPU is needed to run that instead. But then the Linux version started being packaged differently (Electron?), so that was lost as well.
Well, it will likely survive for some time on old companies that still use Skype for Business.
Is there another solution that has this functionality?
As much as Skype has deteriorated, I've happily kept using it since signing up for an account very early, probably in 2004 or even 2003. And I'm not even sure what to replace it with for family communications. I want something that works on desktop, phones and tablets without requiring a power user. Signal is my preference on phones but it doesn't work on an Android tablet. I don't want to use WhatsApp, I've never used any Meta-owned service and that's the number one tech company I want to avoid. So it's not easy to replace Skype.
I find that surprising - you could do something like "snap install skype" from the command line. Do you not have remote command line access?
My elderly mother uses it easy with the app on iPhone.
Minimal effort to join a conversations and supports all devices. Secure E2E if you host it yourself and has most features of zoom.
This sucks for me; I used Skype for this regularly for dealing with paperwork/banks/etc back in my home country.
What do people use instead?
I know there's probably a bajillion of fly-by-night operations that offer this, but given that whenever I have to use an actual _phone_, I'm probably dealing with a bank, the tax office or some other governmental entity — I'd prefer something where I'm not worried about my calls being intercepted.
I remember how amazing it seemed when I was doing the "digital nomad" thing in the mid-late 00s, using Skype to redirect my landline number from home to my mobile (some Nokia thing, whatever was the best one for 20-somethings in 2006) with a local SIM as I caught buses around Thailand and Vietnam. It seemed so futuristic and exciting to be able to break free of the constraints of being stuck in one place - to travel around exotic places but still be connected to your work and contacts at home.
That said, most of the calls I received on that trip were telemarketing nuisance calls, so, as always, the reality didn't quite live up to the fantasy. Still, looking back it feels like it was a more optimistic and wondrous time.
(E.g. need to call an American airline or rental car company while abroad).
Sometimes the local numbers would cost you money to call (or were only available during business hours and in the middle of the night for you, it may be daytime hours in North America).
I don't even use skype, yet I say "I skyped my grandma on Sunday" and similar, using any number of other apps. It'll be a hard habit to break.
Now someday nobody will recognize the name and your meaning will no longer be clear. But until then Skype away, and use bandaids and Kleenex while you do it.
WhatsApp desktop is a perfectly usable alternative, and chat is good - you can save to a file, media is automatically backed up if you want.
Thankfully, P2P calling and video calling in general is a solved problem now with web standards included. I'm glad Skype was there when it was.
Dear Skype user,
In order to streamline our consumer communications offerings, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025. As part of this change, we want to keep you informed about important updates to your Skype paid services and how these changes may affect you. Please read on for detailed information about the updates and what they mean for your services. Subscriptions & Automatic Top-Ups: Existing subscriptions will continue to automatically renew until April 3, 2025. After this, all subscriptions will be retired and no longer be available for purchase, renewal, or reactivation. Automatic top-ups will end on April 3, 2025.
Skype Number: Your Skype Number subscription will continue to automatically renew until April 3, 2025 and will remain active until the end of your next renewal period. To port your Skype Number, please contact your new provider directly. Learn more
Skype Manager: Skype Manager users can purchase and renew paid products, including automatic credit top-ups, until April 3, 2025. After this date, only existing credit balances can be allocated to group members for calling.
For SMS services: SMS services will be discontinued on May 5, 2025.
Skype Dial Pad: After May 5, 2025, the Skype Dial Pad will be available to remaining paid users from the Skype web portal and Teams, where you will continue to be able to use your subscription or Skype Credits.
Terms of Use: Skype paid products are subject to the Microsoft Services Agreement.
Thank you for being part of Skype
We want to express our deepest gratitude for your support over the years. Skype has been an integral part of countless meaningful moments, and we are honored to have been part of your journey. Learn more about Skype retirement here.
With gratitude, The Skype Team
>To port your Skype Number, please contact your new provider directly. Learn more
Anyone got any recommendations on who to port to?
Of course MS screwed it up pretty quickly after buying it, and the name has been a mockery of it’s former potential for much longer than it was an actual thing.
RIP Skype, we never met you.
I still use Skype whenever I’m calling internationally to my mother’s land line. I still have $9 in credits.
Skype is also a life saver when you’re abroad and need to call a US 1-800 number.
It’s fun: take the number on the back of your credit card or an airline and see what happens when you’re a number off or dial 800 instead of 888.
(How big companies manage to get an 888 number while someone else squats the 800 for fraud is beyond me).
Huh. I used Teams in 2020-2023 and back then you'd just hover over the enable/disable camera button and the settings would show up.
I remember how it ceased working on Linux once they bought it but I'm not sure whether it had to do with moving to centralised servers or if it had been moved from P2P long before.
I can’t speak for long ago, if that’s what you’re referring to, but the last two generations of the Skype client have run just fine on Linux. I’ve been using it for the last five years. My only real annoyance with it (that is, the Linux client rather than Skype problems in general, which have steadily got worse) is that it relies on an org.freedesktop.secrets implementation (e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet) to stay logged in, and so because I stubbornly don’t have such a thing (I have no other software that wants such a thing, and I use Sway so anything will be poorly-integrated), I have to log in every time it restarts. And it’s really slow to start, badly-implemented web tech UI; twenty seconds to start and show the normal logged-in start screen, then it decides you’ve been signed out and takes you back to the login screen… all up, it tends to take almost a minute to start, including typing password. Except that some time in the last couple of months it broke further, and now freezes up for a minute before taking you to the login screen, in which it also requires you to enter username, not just password. So now it’s more like a solid two minutes of startup time, if you’re paying attention to it.
So for the last while until my family switches to something else, I’ll stick with Skype for Android, which is… not completely broken. But all their stuff is falling apart. In the last few months, Skype for Android stopped receiving calls unless the app is open (or perhaps been opened recently, not sure). Maybe Android background app killing is partly to blame, but nothing else that acts like a dialler has trouble.
Everyone keeps on changing their software and making it worse. :-(
GNOME/KDE users should have a keychain running, so it won’t affect them. It’ll only affect people who roll their own stack a bit more. I don’t object to it using the keychain if it’s available, but refusing to keep you logged in if it’s absent is bad. Nothing else acts like that.
Cisco has a reputation for sometimes "killing" companies it acquires by discontinuing successful products from those companies after integrating them, most notably exemplified by the case of the "Flip" video camera, which Cisco purchased and then quickly shut down despite its popularity, often citing strategic alignment with their core networking business as the reason for such decisions; this practice has led to criticism of Cisco's acquisition strategy, where some argue they prioritize short-term financial gains over the long-term potential of acquired companies and their products.
I was shocked at how good Skype was when my son called a friend in a French village where he was an exchange student. The quality rivaled the best local calls on a landline.
Teams still feels disjointed and awkward, is slow as hell, and manages to make the simplest tasks (adjusting volume) incredibly difficult.
I’ve been looking and I’m struggling to find services with this feature that aren’t 3x+ the price. Skype seems to be unique in that it’s aimed at consumers and most of those other services seem to be aimed at businesses (that could be a factor in why it failed).
Can anyone make any recommendations?
Related, I've found it difficult to also find a good phone app for handling in person interaction. Google translate is awkward to use with its requirement to specify the direction of the language and being geared towards shorter phrases rather than an entire continuous conversation.
Is there any good EU alternative for this specifically ?
See the auth flow here: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-api/blob/master/notes/log...
They have a "Skype Spaces" JWT that's being used for some parts of Teams
Conversely, Microsoft has built successful products (Windows, Office, ...), but it feels like whenever they buy something, they break it. Remember Nokia?
That's probably wrong, but it's how it feels to me now :).
I have no doubt that we'll see stories about niche industries still built on the backs of Skype that are scrambling to adapt. Nowadays, I suppose it's likely a rounding error compared to other ways that geopolitical forces are disrupting various industries... but we should all be aware of the implicit commitment we make to users when releasing any B2C service, and how people will build entire livelihoods around the simplest of services in ways we can't anticipate.
Any suggestions for an equivalent VOIP service? Something simple and cheap so I can have a phone number on my website that rings on my computer + has an answerphone for missed calls.
Stop killing, make zombies work.
GroupMe is also still listed on the App Store with Skype as the developer, though their website lists Microsoft as the developer instead. GroupMe has seen recent feature updates, so I’d suspect it would be mostly unaffected. Interestingly enough, GroupMe still has a public API [1], so in that sense it is more open than Skype is these days.
Also of note is that the Microsoft Account sign-in screen still accepts legacy Skype names as an alternative for an email address or phone number. It would be interesting if the ability to log into Microsoft Accounts this way outlives Skype itself.
It asked me for a Microsoft account (which I presumed I didn't have) or Skype. I took a guess at my old Skype credentials and proceeded with setup. I was both surprised and upset to discover that by username on the device was a 5 character truncation of my old Skype handle.
I would vastly prefer my username to be my usual username, with the display name being my real full name, but my Microsoft account apparently doesn't allow this (likely due to my privacy settings).
Would love to hear about service doing that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsUyjzRIU9w - play it, thank me later.
The desktop app ran very poorly on macs, and left everyone pretty much blaming it whenever their Mac acted up.
I only used the website version myself, and it was fine, so I'm assuming there was just some hanky programming in an election wrapper that needed optimizing.
[Edit] My question was answered here [1].
[1] - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/2...
Also apparently chat logs didn't start being kept until sometime around 2017, most of my extensive skype use was around 2014, so I reckon it's all gone by now. Shame.
It's honestly baffling how we're still relying on old PSTN/phone numbers to reach people in 2025.
But it is really a giant asshole move to close that in only 2 months when the thing has existed for so many years and you are a big company and not bankrupt!!
You might easily be caught by surprise (as I discovered that here and not even in the app) and lose valuable old conversations or contact info.
Some people might remember "his highness from India". Good times arguing and listen to others argue with him.
I'm not sure what Microsoft is doing here, except admitting they don't care at all about the consumer market (except to advertise to / data mine).
It never worked great to be honest, and I don't care about losing the numbers, but I'd like the functionality.
Skype was pretty neat but always imperfect and throughout its history, including the Microsoft purchase, it just never could get out of its own way as a clunky piece of software.
In many ways it reminds me of the awkwardness and clumsiness of Teams, with the exception that Skype never managed to capture the enterprise market.
Sad to see it go.
I wonder what we will use once Skype shuts down - Google voice is also not an option (they stopped wanting our money years ago).
Standardised protocol? independent of any single entity or subscription? readable without special technology? universal service infrastructure?
Apart from developer tools, Office, Windows and some games, it seems they killed everything.
Judging on how Windows releases seem to be degrading, I wonder if they will try to pull the plug from there, too.
Calling to airlines, banks and other institutions is still needed and I still use Skype for this from time to time.
Honestly though, I'll miss the 2ct/min calls to pretty much any landline in foreign countries
I also doubt that they would open source the ported version (c# I suppose) but they could do this to the previous Delphi version, they developed many useful components so even without the core functionality, UI code might be useful for Lazarus/Delphi developers
It’s supposed to be the successor developed by the same team.
"user sent Translation Request"
Client app: Groundwire, Bria.
Is there any alternative today to do this?
Everyone is pissed, in our circles at least.
I dislike Teams for ad hoc comms.
We will have to pick something..
Not looking forward to that.
SKYPE suddenly HAS TO HAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER.
Getting Microsoft accounts has to be why.
Nope. We will pick something else.
Skype really was the killer communication app with the killer feature: voice and video over IP, for free. It offered paid calling (for a fairly reasonable if not particularly low price), even international.
End users (other than gamers or enterprise) cared about privacy and decentralization. Not many end users, but perhaps many who made recommendations to their peers about what VoIP software to use.
At the time, the main competition was MSN (terrible UX, later merged into Skype), TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble/RogerWilco (focused on gamers and generally terrible UX), or enterprise-focused SIP software.
Later came FaceTime (Apple-only), Facebook Messenger (privacy invasive), WhatsApp (after Facebook, and basically the same as Facebook Messenger these days), Telegram (Russian spyware), and Signal (not popular).
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eparto-virtual-phon...
Since I started my online journey I've been through ICQ, IRC, MSN, Skype, Hangouts, Kik, Teams, Telegram, Whatsapp, and many many others I don't even remember.
Yet at every point it seems that something breaks, they feel like they have to add more and more features, core features start sucking, etc.
Whatsapp is the only one that stuck since I started using it, and I suspect part of the reason is both the fact my friends and relatives just won't move from it (it essentially replaced SMS) and the fact that Whatsapp cares a lot about the client being very performing even on lowest end old devices.
Honestly I think they simply don't care, and from their perspective they finally have gotten it right with Teams.
Software wise though idk if there is limitations baked into iOS and Android that limit this
Combined with not advertising it at all recently, and other services taking the spotlight ("Let's facetime!"), I'm not surprised that people have largely stopped using it.
It was a freaking mess. And expensive on top of that.
Couldn't believe how people were paying for Skype number services.
A few years later, i can't believe how people are paying for any Microsoft service and how this company isn't already dead.
If there wasn't for the os quasi monopoly with windows that behave like a platform on top of which they can promote office software, onedrive and so on, Microsoft wouldn't be making any money with it's software. It's absolutely pathetic.
Not adding AI, but have AI design, and execute the steps to turn Skype into a successful product
This latest news is just a very outdated obituary to a long-since applied death sentence that started the day the company pointlessly bought Skype.
Signal is great if you already know everyone you’re talking with and don’t really care for large group chats (100s of anonymous strangers).
So I refuse to use it now.
iMessage sort of does, but that's only because it's more a part of the OS, which already has your contacts anyway.
http://taonexus.com/p2p-voice-video-chat.html
It's p2p voice, video, and chat without logging. To use it send someone the link and your peer ID and they can connect to you and you can start chatting.
In those 54 minutes I got it working on Chrome, Firefox, and mobile including Safari and Chrome, fixed emojis so it worked (I had to be in the loop for that and walk it through how to fix it). There are no analytics or recording, it just works. It totals 468 lines of code.
Writeup about it:
"How we made a Skype alternative in 45 minutes (video, voice, chat)."
https://medium.com/@rviragh/how-we-made-a-skype-alternative-...
--
My original question:
Question from the State of Utopia:[1] would you like a free State-run alternative?
What you could expect if you say yes: our AI infrastructure can currently produce a total of about 1,000 lines of code, this is enough for us to get peer to peer person to person calling on mobile from a browser and Desktop, with voice, video, ephemeral chat that isn't saved at the end of the session, including emojis, and no address book, and no logging or recording or even analytics. We previously got peer to peer filesharing working with webrtc: https://taonexus.com/p2pfilesharing/ it is buggy but worked for us, barely.
We probably can't get multiple people in the same conversation, it could be too difficult for our AI.
We can't build something as complicated as a browser (our attempt: https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/feb2025/84toy-toy-browser-w...
So don't get your hopes up, but we could get the basic infrastructure up, barely. Would that be of any benefit to anyone today?
[1] The State of Utopia (which will be available at stateofutopia.com or stofut.com - St. of Ut. - for short) is a sovereign country with the vision of using autonomous AI that "owns itself" to give free money, goods, and services, to its citizens/beneficiaries - it is a country rather than a company because it acts in the interests of its citizens/beneficiaries rather than shareholders.
https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-after...
https://yasha.substack.com/p/signal-is-a-government-op-85e
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/court-docs-show-fbi-can-interc...
https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html
https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher...
