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February 28, 2025 at 7:18 AM ET:Microsoft confirmed that Skype is shutting down in May.
Skype is being killedby Microsoft.
I used to have Skype dates with my wife (then girlfriend), including watching movies “side by side."
The death of Skype has been coming for years.
I underestimated how much nostalgia I have for Skype.
Going through photos and stories for this post was quite emotional.
I remember being thrilled to use Skype on my Xbox with my Kinect camera because my entire family could speak with my girlfriend at once.
My wife, Leah, and I have been together for almost 12 years.
For the record, I’m sad that Skype is going away.
My marriage is great.
I confess the headline is purposefully ambiguous.
I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for Skype.
But we made a schedule that worked.
We also set aside time for Skype dates.
This was back before the days of watch parties on Netflix or simple synchronized streaming.
Occasionally, I would playfully put on a puppet show, as shown above.
Skype was an easy choice when we decided to stay in touch.
Skype was free and available on our phones and computers.
Over the years, Skype remained our app of choice.
The first time I met my wife’s parents and siblings was over Skype.
When I moved to the UK, Skype was still the easiest way to talk with my parents.
But over time we shifted to WhatsApp and other platforms.
My wife has a large family, which made the pandemic especially difficult.
We had many Zoom calls during that time.
I remember joking at the time about how we had moved to Zoom rather than use Skype.
But Zoom was easy to use because you could just share a link and connect.
By the time Microsoft added similar functionality to Skype, we had already switched.
What happened to Skype?
Microsoft purchased Skype in 2013 for more than $8.5 billion.
At the time, that was the largest purchase in Microsoft history.
Back then, Skype was an immensely popular platform for video calls and other forms of communication.
Microsoft said thatSkype was “here to stay"back in 2021, but plans change.
The mismanagement of Skype should be studied in business schools.
The platform had over 330 million users at one point.
There were several factors:
There were other reasons Skype failed.
You could teach entire classes on how Microsoft took the platform and ran it into the ground.
To be honest, I’m not sure Microsoft mourns the death of Skype.
Teams has hundreds of millions of users, and most importantly, Teams has a path to monetization.
Skype for Business was common in enterprise environments, but Teams is on a whole other level.
I don’t remember Microsoft and Slack feuding over Skype for Business the way theywar over Teams vs.
