Microsoft is killing Skype | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is killing Skype

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751 pointsthund662 comments

The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic to maintain or even expand their lead in video conferencing, while allowing a complete unknown (outside of the corporate world, at least) like Zoom to become the dominant platform, should be studied in business schools.

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.

I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before.

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.

Personally I think their big, incomprehensibly stupid manoeuver was the Skype vs Skype for Business (Link) split. Had they merged them into a single client that could speak either protocol and share contact lists the story would have been very different.

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?

> Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?

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.

Obligatory "Internal structure of tech companies": https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...

Link to original artist: <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts>

(Including a partial update: <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update>)

The Oracle one always gets me lmao

Lync was completely unrelated software with a different tech stack that was just branded as Skype.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business

I know, that's my point - branding Lync (thanks for the correction, I forgot the spelling) damaged the Skype brand to no real benefit.

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.

I don't much care for Teams but I write that off to basically not using the Microsoft Office suite at all and maybe doing a Teams call once every 6 months, if that.

It's not just the enterprise stranglehold, though that's surely part of it. But Teams, at least today and on Windows, is GOOD. It works well for internal meetings and chat, calls are good, and on the unregistered outsider webinar attendee experience, Teams has just been better than Zoom in my experience.

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.

> But Teams, at least today and on Windows, is GOOD.

I don't remember the last time I had a meeting on teams that didn't include a rant about teams

I think it was the other way around, they know about the issues with Skype and built something new, but they knew the power of the Skype brand so they slapped it onto their new product.

I think that must have been the logic. I just contend that it was a stupid approach! They damaged their consumer brand badly to give an imperceptible boost to the business product their customers were already locked into.

This is what happens when you hire leet code engineers and they become managers. Look at Google now. This isn't some magical outcome of big corps. A big corp is practically the people who work there.

It’s not really about ‘leet code engineers’ getting into management but the perverse incentives involved in climbing up the corporate ladder.

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.

It's not just about incentives. It's about selecting for the kind of people who succeed under those incentive structures.

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.

At Microsoft, for every Principal Engineer/Manager there’s a dead internal project that nobody uses but had “… lots of impact.”

Microsoft is built on completely different ethos and evolved from there.

(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.

> "Microsoft is a corporation built upon the idea of intellectual property".

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

I mean time has proven over and over that Gates and Microsoft were right.

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.

America has multiple examples of companies that thrived for decades until a certain type of manager showed up (of which leet code engineers are an aspect; clueless MBA grads are another; there are more). Sears. General Electric. IBM. Companies need to develop a sort of immune response to this type, as they are as charismatic as they are deleterious to company outlooks, and WILL worm their way in if not checked. A more effective Matthew Broderick to stay the Reese Witherspoons of the world.

As long as the companies have a completely autocratic structure, there is no possible way to develop any kind of immune response.

This is assuming that companies are initially led and managed by people who actually care about it and the service/product produced, and that the bean counters and corporate climbers only show up later, when it becomes clear that the business is ripe for exploitation.

There is a bit of irony in this comment since many of the original Skype engineers are now seniors managers at Google still working on communication (they left MS a long time ago).

Google has many issues but I don't think technical competence is one of them.

>Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this?

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 feel like I'm currently experiencing failing upwards.

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

Skype for Business, which was really just a rebranding of Microsoft Lync, destroyed the Skype brand.

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.

> Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?

Yes. rivalry is at it's finest (and fiercest) when you're fighting your peer divisions inside the same company.

Microsoft had MANY opportunities for this, Google as well for that matter. Especially if you consider Instant Messenger clients. I absolutely loved Google Hangouts when it was the all in one solution (including GV and SMS integration on the phone). MS(N) Messenger could have been very close as well a couple times.

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.

Easier to monitor if centralised.

Yes, everyone and their Windows installs and their _NSAKEY guessed the reason was that.

> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before.

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.

I think they killed it when they migrated user login to a Microsoft accounts that nobody used or wanted.

For me at least, it made Skype with synonymous with trying to figure out the email and doing a password reset

> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before.

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)

Well, the better ask is why eBay bought it...

And even when eBay thought they bought it, apparently they didn’t buy all of it:

https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/06/ebay_skype/

https://www.hugheshubbard.com/news/the-best-laid-m-a-plans-h...

Oh it gets better. Apparently some of the stuff they didn't get dated back to Kazaa. Some of the Skype founders were under indictment and traveling incognito while they raised money for the new company.

I had interacted with Pritt Kasesalu (PrittK) when I was very young. In the late 90/early 00s I played an MMO developed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) named Subspace, released in the mid 90s. It was a top down astroids-like space game with maps of up to 100 or more players, even back then.

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530450/Continuum/

Amusingly KaZaA itself was one of my first experiences using an “alternative” client for something. There was KaZaA Lite which removed the bundled Cydoor malware, K++ which added hax features like unlimited searches and forced 1000 node reputation, and the most famous KaZaA Lite K++ which did both. Lots of others too like “KL Extensions”, K-Sig, K-Dat, but those were the two big ones.

Wow that was a blast from the past. I remember hanging out on the K-Lite forums back in the day and when a new release was exciting.

Back in the day when you could download random .exe’s with relatively low risk.

Feels unconscionable today that I used to do that from paytv forums.

I think you linked the wrong steam game, it's https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...

Whoops, thank you, yes.

Makes sense that the SuperPeers core from Kazaa was re-used in Skype.

eBay is just a terrible company. (Yet, I like and use it more than Amazon).

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.

eBay was great for the first few years. After that it just slowly enshittified. The search has only got worse, never better in 20 years.

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

My theory is that they sit on a mountain of technical debt that nobody dares touching. I think they started in Perl, then URLs started pointing to DLLs (!), so heck knows what they've done...

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.

Mass surveillance was easier when anyone, including the NSA, could run a supernode. Microsoft had to run its own supernodes because usage changed from most people running Skype on desktops, which could be supernodes, to most people running Skype on phones, which can't. At that point, it hardly makes sense to push new supernode functionality for multiparty video calls and other optimizations to end users to handle a small fraction of calls when updating your own servers is much easier.

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.

> 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.

That's the point. That's why Skype had supernodes, and that's why Skype on mobiles meant that Microsoft needed to run its own supernodes. At that point, you might as well add features like multiparty video calls, and then it makes no sense to have your users install supernodes software.

Skype mobile didn't matter as long as you still have a decent pool of desktop users online.

Back then in 2009 we were [1] intercepting Skype calls before the offered plugins.

[1] https://www.nektra.com/main/2009/02/24/directsound-capture-u...

Naw, having been there, Microsoft killed Skype because it had no idea how to manage a B2C product.

> microsoft

> 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?

> 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.

> You really think Windows (11, since anything older is gone) is a b2c product? It's free.

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

"Free" for OEMs, or as long as you're already in the system. Outside of enthusiasts, those are the two groups who matter here (not that I'm happy w/ that situation, not at all).

"It has a data mining AI. You are not the customer."

You got most of the tokens right, but windows is a paid product, try that with meta or google products and you got it.

It is sold to integrators, not customers. No one walks into a store and buys a Windows for their computer at home, they buy a computer that has Windows already on it.

Same with car engines

Yes. Companies selling car engines, or bolts, or on-board entertainment systems, are b2b.

It does have B2C products, but does it know how to manage them?

Bingo

Both of those are b2b as well (a spreadsheet accounting program, come on), and were born from b2b, remember this was before the personal compute era, they transitioned with the era.

Part of it was that performance was abysmal. Everyone jumped to Discord (an electron app!) when it released, because it performed better.

From the circles I was in, everyone jumped from Skype / Mumble / Teamspeak because of D/DoS attacks after having their ip exposed.

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.

Mumble was never P2P.

I think they killed it by making it unusable through forcing dubious UI/UX/design-principle/other-bs trends for no compelling reason at all on a perfectly good interface.

Sadly this is the culture now at tech companies. All the data has to go through company servers, whether it makes technical sense or not

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.

Did they want multi device? How do you sync messages? History?

You can sync with timestamps

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

There are also Jami and Tox as decentralized Slack alternatives.

Or Mattermost, Zulip, or... Briar, among others. :P

Mattermost and Zulip aren't decentralized.

True, you can only self-host.

Skype was born in a world of laptops and either wireless or otherwise unmetered internet. You can have a P2P system there.

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.

Smartphones killed Skypes strong P2P presence.

Almost everything I do for work uses teams, so I can't say MS missed any boats. It's spectacular how pervasive teams is given how universally reviled it is. I'd personally switch back to slack in a heartbeat for instance.

Don't know about Slack's videoconf, but Slack's cheap insistence that we pay a rip-off amount of money per month for storing some TEXT messages more than 90 days has continuously degraded my appreciation for it over the last years to the level of me hating it now.

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 :)

Slack is primarily a business tool, and for a business tool $10/user/month is extremely reasonable for the value (perceived or real) it brings. The company has to make money, and you do that by charging for your products and services, and that price is not exorbitant.

The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the retention to 1yr.

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...

They don’t want records around that expose crimes when discovery happens, and they want that so much that they shave a percent or two off the company’s productivity to get it.

> The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the retention to 1yr.

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.

If it's important enough to mention in a document then the person creating the document should preserve a copy of what is clearly ephemeral information. It's just as daft was referencing emails in a document.

Yes, but what people should do rarely matches what they actually do and deleting old messages just makes it impossible to recover that info.

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.

This frustrates me too. Discord stores your messages forever for free! They're slowly eating Slack's lunch when it comes to internet communities... but I guess Slack doesn't really care; those communities were never going to pay any real money anyway.

Slowly? Discord is #1 in gaming and probably dev too

Yeah, I'd say discord taking skype's lunch in the gaming market was something that happened "rapidly" and "in 2016".

EDIT: Oh, this subthread is about slack.

I do think Slack's permissions model is better suited to business use than Discord's.

You may like to look at a self-hosted mattermost then.

Slack is part of Salesforce now. Do I need to say anything else?

you're getting services for free and you call them cheap?

Yeah, I just checked to reply to another commenter, and Slack's just expensive:

Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user

Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo

M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo

At my job we use Teams, but basically just for meetings (and the associated chat), and it works really well. About the only complaint I could make is that it occasionally guesses the wrong audio devices, but it's fairly easy to change them.

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.

Yeah teams for actual phone calls is good, often with better noise cancelling and reliability than zoom these days.

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.

At a company I worked at someone saved some important data in Teams and left the company and I was tasked with trying to export it but it turns out it would have taken significant time scripting the API to extract all the data. They said forget it and just left it in the Teams and made sure not to delete her account.

It's in her OneDrive most likely, go pluck it out of there.

That's because "Teams" inside Teams are not part of Teams, it's tied to Sharepoint/Exchange and thus poorly integrated.

What? Teams was and is everywhere. The opportunity was taken so hard, the EU ruled that Teams must be decoupled from the Office Suite and Windows because it was near impossible to not have or use Teams. All that happened because and during the pandemic.

This. In German the word for "video-calling" is "Skyping". Similar to MSN, the strength of the brand and goodwill that it has in some geographies is on-par with Google for search, or Coca Cola for coke. The fact that the software got consistently worse, year on year on year is hard to grasp for me. Microsoft made the right call to cannibalize and use teams. But how was Skype such a pain? Not being able to share screenshots in chat killed it for me.

Coke is a trademark owned by Coca-Cola - the generic word is cola. Their brand is so strong that even though you were thinking about the topic of branding they still got you!

"Yes, in many parts of Europe, people commonly use the word "coke" as a generic term for soda, similar to how it is used in the American South, essentially referring to any type of cola beverage rather than just the Coca-Cola brand; this is because Coca-Cola is so widely recognized across the continent." --Google's ai thing

Interesting, where I lived (NZ), "coke" was the typical term for Coca-Cola (not generic soda, but you may be asked if Pepsi is OK), however in NL where I live now it's pretty universally "cola", and I think that's also not generic. Can't speak to other European countries though, I've never noticed.

In the U.S., it tends to be a regional thing. Coke, soda, pop are all in common use as the general term for soft drinks.

I'd use "cola" in Dutch to refer to the generic type of drink, which is pretty much universal in Dutch AFAIK. But I would use "coke" in English. I'm not sure where I picked that up: I've lived in a combination of England/Ireland/NZ over many years, and to be honest I'm not actually sure how it's used there. Maybe just from US films?

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!

I don't know for other European countries, but at least I can say that it is not true in France. "Coke" is reserved for cocaine, and cola is the generic word for Coca-Cola-like beverages.

I don't drink enough to say for certain, but I'll say that I've heard "coca" a lot, but I never hear "cola."

In France coca is a bit generic term for coca cola and pepsi But if you have a brand that sell coke we use cola Like breizh cola or a <supermarket brand> cola

I've heard that the French are strict about language, but what does "reserved" mean here? What do the French call coke¹?

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel) ?

I'd suspect the vast majority of France never has to worry about that type of coke, or maybe even knows it exists.

One upon a time wikipedia used to have links to the other language wikis on the same entry. Now I have to edit the URL to jump to the disambiguation page https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke which tells me it is also "coke" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(charbon)

It still does.

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.)

Coca cola, coca light, coca zero.

"Charbon". The French commoner will refer to the rock coke as "charbon de terre", shortened to charbon. Similar to "pomme" is apple, and "pomme de terre" is apple from the earth (potato). Charbon is also the word for charcoal.

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.

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).

"Un coke s'il vous plaît" is not a proper French sentence. It does not sound right. It will be obvious it's a language difference and people will easily guess coca cola. In fact French people will most likely quip back "Un coca vous voulez dire ?".

Fun aside, coca cola/cola is male. Cocaïne is female. A rail (of coke) is male.

> I've heard that the French are strict about language, but what does "reserved" mean here? What do the French call coke¹?

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/...

If you say the word coke (\kok\) in front of a Frenchman, they will immediately think of cocaine. Most people aren't aware of the other meaning of coke. They will probably say it's coal (charbon), the technical term being coke (but pronounced \kɔk\) or apparently charbon de terre according to the other comments.

In the US south if you ask for a coke they will ask which kind - Pepsi, sprite, or a Coke coke? Etc

In Germany, MS was very successful though to get organizations on Teams during the pandemic. Zoom is not a thing.

Sure, it's nice to brand the verb, but when the product behind it is EOL, why bother.

That's because teams was offered for fee with m365 which most companies used anyway.

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.

Looking at the Linux version with their hard coded list of supported distros when trying to share your screen...

I'd say both.

Zoom is a thing in Germany.

In the US, I would say roughly everyone uses Zoom outside of companies using Teams or Meet, generally because they're bundled with the office suites they use.

Jitsi and BBB were pretty popular across universities at the time, back when the German government were pivoting hard into Element/Matrix:

https://element.io/matrix-in-germany

Zoom was popular with at home schoolkids. Because to use Teams you had to have a Microsoft acccount first. Zoom was a link, a meeting ID, and password. Sometimes just a link.

I've actually never had to put a password in to any zoom call. It was always just the link. Only when calling from a phone did i have to put even the meeting ID in

You can optionally add the password as a query parameter to the zoom link itself. The links you got probably had that.

Missed?

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

I suspect quite a few people still use Zoom out of habit / procedure, but you can see on its stock market value that it really was a pandemic success, its stock market dropped and flattened out after 2022.

Now that I'm not at a company that uses Google Workplace, Zoom is far and away the most common video chat I see--but with a few exceptions, I think it's pretty much all just personal accounts.

Discord missed an opportunity to become the video calling and chat king, the smoothness of joining and leaving a group video chat when you please and the high quality video, audio and app support was exactly the kind of "just like being in the office but virtual" experience that teams, skype, slack, zoom, meet, etc lack. During peak covid it was a godsend having calls with friends and playing games together.

My dream service would be very like discord but with scheduled meeting support and completely open source and self hostable.

Gaming laptops today are the best AI laptops. They will never sell as well to the masses because they have a gaming aesthetic. This is true for Discord as well. Skinning HN like it's Facebook will turn you off, even if it has the content you want believe it or not.

Quite a few gaming laptops these days have slightly more subdued aesthetics. Unfortunately they're still huge due to cooling requirements (or rather, because that's a dimension that can be sacrificed without too much trouble) though.

A deaf colleague massively preferred Zoom to Teams because the video quality on Zoom allowed a lot more sign language nuance to transfer.

Zoom has live captioning at lest for the paid version

Both Skype and Teams have captioning. Skype even has voice translation that aims to reproduce the vocal timbre.

Zoom is widely used in US city and state government departments because of the ease of use and pricing, basically free.

It's entirely Zoom for my branch of academia.

I have literally never once used teams officially in any degree. Every call i made before i graduated high school was skype, every school and graduate and job call I've ever made has been zoom.

My company uses Teams and Zoom. Every Teams meeting is a disaster compared to Zoom. At least it's not Amazon Chime. IDK how AWS Support survives that

Amazon are eoling chime

>The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic

They missed the huge opportunity way before on mobile and in gaming, that's when WhatsApp and Discord stepped in and destroyed Skype.

A message from the Skype CEO [NSFW]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E

That was great :)

Big corporations are usually super slow and clumsy in implementing anything new or doing any quick changes.

MS was very quick with implementing LLMs everywhere.

I believe they rolled the Skype technology into MS Teams and made teams their dominant video platform. MS Teams is pretty widely used based on all the complaints I hear about it. I didn't even realize Skype was still an option.

Teams is used quite a bit.

huh? Microsoft massively leverage their market position and spread their teams application like the plague!

They just decided they like teams more then skype

Skype should be a textbook case of how a product team will keep inventing new projects to justify their continued employment, even if it means messing with a winning formula.

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.

Skype was perfect BEFORE the Microsoft acquisition. Everything afterwards was unnecessary. Source: I used Skype before and after 2011.

Group calls weren't perfect. P2P doesn't lend itself well to group calls.

Wasn't the whole point of O.G. Skype that it was entirely peer to peer, and did not require a central service? Then, once Microsoft bought it, the first thing they did was ditch that and make it require centralized servers? IMO peak Skype was right before it was bought. Agreed though, every time Microsoft touched it, they made it worse. But many (most?) software is like that now. I dread new releases, because everyone makes software worse now.

msmsgs.exe was p2p. Came with Windows 98, possibly 95. Video, audio, text.

Maybe microsoft forgot they made that?

The selling point of original Skype was that it allowed making audio calls on worst connections, requiring just several kilobytes/sec, and going through NATs (other products required a direct fast connection and were usable only within a local network). As for P2P, I don't think users care about that. Not having P2P is actually better because P2P can disclose your IP address.

For example, Tox is a fully decentralized P2P messenger and it is not widely popular.

There was some drama with regarding to Tox a couple of years ago. I do not remember the specifics.

Is there a security whitepaper for it?

Right, but that architecture falls apart in a mobile-first world.

The p2p part was relevant for the operators as Skype didn't need to run (and pay) their own servers to deal with the load, but some other user close by provided it for free, giving low latency all over the world.

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.

Skype pre-acquisition had constant sync issues. I'd sometimes send a message that would only show up days later, or someone would call me and it would only ring on a different device. P2P was obviously cheaper for them to run, but it became far more stable after they introduced servers.

That's how I feel about Reddit. They just keeping adding things nobody wants because otherwise how do they justify their salaries and their stock price?

Microsoft didn’t miss their opportunity with COVID, teams user base grew by the millions

The anti-trust reactions may undo a lot of that, that already hasn't been undone. I know too many orgs that hate Teams and just want to stick to slack, etc.

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.

Some suit was probably worried about cannibalizing their Teams business (even though Skype has better name recognition and Teams has a bad reputation).

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.

Remember, Teams was originally "Skype for Business".

Originally it was Office Communicator, then Lync, then Skype for Business and now Teams.

Digital cameras were mostly useless in the 80s and early 90s for rank and file consumers. The demand wasn't there.

Kodak doesn't make lenses or camera hardware, so it's possible they didn't pursue digital cameras because they'd be immediately out-competed by Sony, Canon and Nikon.

What are you talking about? Microsoft Teams took over everything else during and after the pandemic. The reason for Skype being left behind was that everyone started using Teams in enterprises.

When my then-girlfriend went off to study in a different country about 10 years ago, Skype was the only video call solution I was able to get working between our OS X and Linux laptops. Generally worked fairly well, too.

Since then, I had forgotten it even existed: "Microsoft is killing Skype? Wasn't it dead yet?"

Didn't Microsoft Teams soundly defeat Zoom, Slack, and all the others? I was under the impression that Teams has at least an order of magnitude more active users than any competitor.

It does, but Teams is mostly a thing within businesses. Skype is a consumer side brand, which MS is scuttling in favour of Teams (which is a really weird brand to try to use for consumer-side customers). They could've used Teams architecture/app and branded it as Skype, it would've made way more sense than Teams (free) which is what they're doing now. Consumer side Microsoft Accounts and business are different worlds, it'd help MS a lot to speak about them clearly.

But MS and good product naming, well...

Teams has more users but most of those users didn't choose Teams - it was thrust upon them.

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.

I tried for a bit.. it really sucks outside the work context, and much like when there were too many competing IM products, it just doesn't work without all the people.

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.

Teams (which includes the guts of Lync... aka Skype For Business) has grown into Microsoft's behemoth (320 million active daily users while Zoom only has 200k business customers and actually declined YoY).

If you are talking non-business free users then sure, Zoom comes out on top.

Doesn't Microsoft install it on every windows laptop automatically? Are they all "users"?

Active daily users. Any company with Office suite (which is basically any behemoth in every single country) just uses Teams, instead of paying up for Slack.

It also , at least for people in some circles, doesn’t have the negative connotations that Teams does.

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.

During covid I asked if I could switch my monthly Skype number to annual and they said the only way is to cancel and resubscribe, with a new phone number. It was clear they didn't care even back then.

> The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling

IMO this hasn’t been true since 2020.

It's just insane how this is a pattern with microsoft. That should be studied. It's not meant snarky. I am really fascinated. I dislike microsoft but feel that my bias is taking over whenever i get to say things like "of course it failed– it's microsoft". But it is also true every time. Somehow microsoft has a unique talent to take things and just find ways to screw it up in ways, people couldn't imagine. That is really, really fascinating.

But, of course: thank god they blow it every time. They bring the spotlight to the places where others create good things.

Skype (the original product/service, before Microsoft's corporate hug of death) was an amazing piece of technology.

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!

> before Microsoft's corporate hug of death

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!

but m$ doesn't have a monopoly on video/instant chat? teams is so objectively bad that anyone who was using skype will move on to a different company's product

That they failed to successfully profit from their crime does not obviate it from being criminal. Skype was created in 2003, I do hope it's appreciated how much smaller the market was back then, on top of how bandwidth constrained it was.

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 personal setting? You may be right.

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."

Some corporates, yes. Many others, no. A true sign there's no monopoly here, just regular old vendor lock in.

I wish that were true. Every enterprise I've seen has thrown their hands up and said "we already use microsoft for everything else (generally email, ad, or office) and teams is bundled why would we use anything else". So instead of getting good chat and VoIP apps, the decision makers just stick with the cheapest option (Teams, they're already paying for it in one of their tens of other Microsoft subscriptions)

Didn’t MSFT recently uncouple teams license from O365? I think you now need a separate license to use business teams, but also why use anything else.

Yes, they did. They were forced by the eu commission to do so as bundling teams was an anti-competitive practice, similar to when Microsoft bundled internet explorer into windows, effectively killing the market for web browsers.

Compared to the rubbish that is MS accounts or email, teams is outright awesome compared to it's competitors! At least you don't get logged out of your email app and don't get notifications or any indication until you dig deep into what's going on (let's not even talk about how agonizingly slow outlook is). Or the rubbish of having to dig 3 levels down into the settings to get outlooks 2fa token (good look if the aforementioned lock out happened). I could go on. I seriously don't understand how companies would go with this rubbish (especially for shops which use Linux for a large fraction of their dev machines).

> teams is so objectively bad

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 worked at a company that used teams a few years ago, after an acquisition. I'd routinely not get notifications for DMs and other important messages. The devops guy was trying to figure out how to port our slack prod errors channel to teams. I felt bad for him. Can't remember if he ever succeeded.

I also really like Slacks huddles and Discord VC's (we treated them like conference rooms).

Jami (https://jami.net) and Tox (https://tox.chat) are better, being P2P and open source.

Speaking of hugs, remember the mantra: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

> Speaking of hugs, remember the mantra: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

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.

Monopoly? My god man get a grip.

Thank you for this thorough analysis.

Skype was founded 2003, wholly bought by eBay in 2005. MS bought it from eBay in 2011, when Skype had 30m users, which was and is tiny compared to relevant markets for videoconferencing. Even now Teams has around 30% of the market. In the 14 years since the purchase MS increased Skype usage significantly and brought the tech to a vastly bigger audience.

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.

> It was also available literally everywhere

I remember trying to run SkypeKit on my Kindle. Didn’t get it to make calls, but I think it received chat messages!

Pre Microsoft Skype was malware-grade good. I still remember sysadmins imploding in impotent rage as it near effortlessly evaded their firewalling attempts.

2000's era P2P was wickedly good.

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.

Jini may be an example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini

I remember Bill Venners used to write about it on his site artima.com .

>2000's era P2P was wickedly good.

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.

This. The tech works and is great. But it's not in the interests of the megacorps that took over from 2008ish onwards.

Well that and people seem to really enjoy (or at least feel compelled to use) social networks.

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

I don't buy it. DHT systems have mechanisms to handle hotspots in the network.

There’s nothing to buy.

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.

What would you recommend these days? All I know is 2000s software like Shareaza, LimeWire, Gnutella, etc.

qBittorrent, any public tracker (pirate bay is still alive and well) or query the DHT directly using BTDigg for bonus points.

As a P2P Skype alternative, there are: Jami (https://jami.net) and Tox (https://tox.chat).

I think that NAT is a major reason why P2P and self hosting failed to take off in any significant way. I think that the internet would have been a wildly different place were IPv6 widespread in the early '00s.

I wonder why NAT hole punching techniques never took off much with P2P, it seems like with enough work getting around NAT most of the time would be possible.

You can't hole punch on mobile. Most mobile networks use symmetric NATs unfortunately.

Good, reliable ways to do hole punching were not available until relatively late (STUN, ICE) and were somewhat finicky for a long time, especially on crappy routers.

Also, multiple levels of nat are unfortunately common and make STUN unreliable

Smart phones killed Skypes rich P2P. Then Microsoft added permanent nodes too little too late. The synching was awful on mobile too. The app would lock up waiting to download every single chatlog going back years. Just download the last ten and quietly download the rest in a separate thread.

Microsoft was not fast moving enough to keep Skype at its prime.

Back in the Windows 7 days I installed Skype on my parents computer before moving abroad, their user experience was basically like receiving a phone call. Even though they weren't tech savvy we never had any issues. I would call them, and if they were home and near the computer, they could answer it and we'd be video chatting.

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.

On a related note, a bit over a decade ago I had installed logmein on my parents' computer to be able to easily help them with any IT issues. But they since pivoted away from personal accounts and I never found anything else as straightforward. I feel that in a lot of ways tech has regressed.

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.

[0] https://get.gotomypc.com/plansandpricing#feature-list

Have you tried AnyDesk? It’s free for personal use and I think does what you’re looking for.

I use TeamViewer for remote support

If you have a decent connection I find just using Windows Remote Desktop (RDP) over VPN (Tailscale) works really well.

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.)

Windows has a built in app for remote servicing called QuickAssist. Works perfect, no need to install anything.

> I just found that logmein actually offer a personal product again, named GoToMyPC

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

> It's interesting to see the focus on PDAs now that the product category is entirely dead:

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.

I see them as fundamentally different because PDAs mostly didn't have network connectivity at all, while modern phones are connectivity-first and gained functionality from there. It was novel to have a PDA with a modem that did anything, much less provide connectivity back to one's home computer.

That's a fundamental difference in their history, but not in what they turned into. Especially, again, in the context of screen sharing-- a PDA would've needed to have networking in order to run GoToMyPC. It's "device in your pocket that lets you control a bigger computer with remote desktop" either way.

Try RustDesk instead of a bunch of proprietary alternatives suggested by other posters. It uses H.264/H.265/VP9 depending on your hardware and network, and is very fast. It also lets you set up your own server, leaking no information to third parties, but that's optional.

I know this is about Windows, but just in case any Mac users don't know, there's a default app called Screen Sharing (in Applications > Utilities) that lets you dial into any other Mac user's computer if you have their iCloud username, allowing you to both see and control their screen. It doesn't work 100% of the time - sometimes it requires a tweak on a wifi router on the other end - but it's saved me countless hours on unproductive phone calls while helping my mother with tech issues on her iMac.

It hasn’t regressed really, it’s just no longer free. Microsoft quick assist exist and allows you to connect to any pc with the users client code.

Windows actually has a built-in remote assistance tool now called Quick Assist. It provides a simple way to remotely control another Windows machine with user consent, without requiring third-party software. It's preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11—just launch 'Quick Assist' from the Start menu, generate a session code, and connect. While it's not as feature-rich as a full remote desktop solution, it's more than enough for parental IT support.

Starting with Windows 10 this functionality was bundled with the OS

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/solve-pc-problem...

I installed wireguard and just use remote desktop

I think Chrome Remote Desktop works pretty well. It's easy enough to configure for use and put a link to the host page in the browser toolbar. I might setup RustDesk if I get the time, it was in a state of flux last time I looked at it, but it seems to be more solid now.

Telegram does that and also has a native (as in C++/Qt) desktop client, unlike almost every other messenger.

WhatsApp these days also has native clients for Windows and macOS (UWP and Catalyst, respectively). They don't yet have all the features of the Electron/web client, but are getting there, and at least on macOS, I much prefer the experience.

Also, I wouldn't exactly call Qt native, unless you happen to be on KDE.

Exactly! This is a trend nowadays. Go to web - they even make apps for it, just to put you to that webpage - then do some or all of [1].

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"

Do they not want to use a smartphone?

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!

My grandparents were terrible at smartphones. To them, it's like a landline phone, but you have to charge it every 1-2 days. Yet my grandpa was decent at PC, and email, and so on, as it was in "a place" and easy to drive.

I think this is definitely get them an iPad and use FaceTime territory. They seem to be the least invasive in terms of just letting you get on with the task in hand, instead of having to understand what a OneUI update is and what each of the 5 different TOS checklist items means.

Skype is the epitome of technical debt. Millions of lines of code for a service that isn't technically difficult to provide anymore. When I was at Microsoft, I was told working on Skype was about as popular as being sent to a gulag.

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.

“Skype for Business” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business) sort-of was that. It put the “Skype” brand on “Lync”, which was a rebranded “Office Communicator” (IIRC, there were some technical changes along the line, too, but I may misremember that)

It got replaced by Teams.

And Skype had to maintain compatibility with many of these services that came and went.

> The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version

I am not.

The brand is strong in a negative way, I have never met anyone who ever liked Skype.

Then my guess is you're not old enough to have used it much when it first came out. Because at that time, it wasn't really competing with other internet calling services, it was competing with international phone rates that were dollars a minute. In some cases it actually made long distance relationships viable that otherwise weren't.

I have. Skype was very popular in many places around the world.

This Joel on Software blog post is now 25 years old, https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-..., but when it first came out it was widely viewed as gospel.

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.

Sometimes the technology "background" changes so much that the codebase you have just becomes irrelevant.

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

So the answer can change over time. You have to periodically re-assess the benefits of a rewrite.

> Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more?

Yes, if it is less bloated than Electron-based. See Jami, which is a native app and it's distributed and open source.

Skype probably was rewritten multiple times - C++ client was replaced with Electron, and server API was broken many times as well. The reason Microsoft shuts down Skype is not because there is too much technical debt but because there are few paying customers and because there are new messengers like Telegram.

> I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.

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-...

Skype is 20 years old.

Tech has advanced enormously in that time.

Funnily enough, I put that blog post in a sibling comment and described why I think it's bad advice. Why don't you think Skype is a perfect counterpoint to Joel's argument? I mean, Skype basically died because they didn't throw it away and start from scratch. Like the parent comment said, competitors came up, and what used to be a million line giant project was about a bajillion times easier when WhatsApp came along.

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.

Sell the brand to Signal

They did launch a from scratch electron crap at least once. That version didn't migrate settings/account. Had to help at least 3 different people who suddenly lost access to their contacts.

The 2.0 version of Skype is Microsoft Teams, and they built it from scratch.

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.

Teams also has a lot of technical debt in it's own given that they essentially combined Yammer with Sharepoint and Office to make it!

Thanks, that's a good point that makes the most sense to me - MS didn't rewrite it because they essentially didn't need to, they already had something else.

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.

Yeah, the consumer side Teams app is already different in UX than the corporate one. Wouldn't have been terribly difficult to brand that as Skype and market it as such.

> and they built it from scratch.

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.

Launching a Skype 2.0 incompatible with 1.0 clients/users would be a quick way to completely ruin said brand value.

Of course, as we see here, not doing anything had the same effect in the end...

I worked at Skype from eBay to Microsoft. The clients were rewritten, sometimes from scratch, sometimes redesigned to chase after the latest UI trend. But rewriting clients didn't address the fact that the OG widely successful Skype was fundamentally peer-to-peer. There were no servers, only supernodes.

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.

Why not open source Skype then?

It's valid to think of this as Microsoft sort of squandering a unique opportunity to become the ubiquitous video conferencing standard by not investing in Skype, back when it had a market-leading position. Another way to look at this is that even though they bungled this, they still managed to become that solution through Teams. Even though they failed to compete with Skype, got leapfrogged by Slack, and then again by Zoom, they still manage to come out on top, at least in corporate America.

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.

The way Microsoft “won” with Teams was through monopolistic bundling it into Windows and Office. To this day most people don’t like using Teams for chat, but because it’s there by default there’s not a good reason to go through the hassle of bringing on another product.

>> To this day most people don’t like using Teams for chat

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.

I don't know anyone who prefer Teams over Slack.

I do.

But anecdotal evidence isn't worth much.

Slack huddles and screen share are trash even compared to Teams let alone Zoom.

And that will last until the regulators start cracking down on that monopoly like they started cracking down on Google...

They gained it back by basically giving Teams away for free and getting companies to say "we're already paying for this bundle, so let's stop paying for Zoom/Slack." They still missed out on billions which they'll try to claim back over years of slow price raises (until the competition lowers prices and/or becomes more competitive).

Tangential: I have a U.S. Skype Number (i.e., a real phone number offered by the Skype service) that's mainly used to receive and make (occasional) calls from/to a bank and to receive SMS occasionally. The cost is about $40 a year. With Skype Number not available for purchase since December and the Skype platform (including Skype Number) going away soon, what are some simple, good (and preferably cheaper) alternatives for a VoIP service that works on an iPhone? I do not have any (other) real phone number in the U.S. I guess my current Skype Number cannot be ported or moved to another service.

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.

It seems what you are looking for is a SIP provider. There are many. Some of them allow interconnection with the "real" phone network.

If only SIP wasn't such a trashfire of non-interoperating impossible to configure garbage.

google fi

VoIP.ms

Try zadarma.com I've multiple numbers there

Any issue receiving SMS messages with zadarma? In the past I have banks block numbers that come from VoIP providers.

Yes, there is still a problem there. Some 'clever' services are blocking probably all VOIP numbers, not only zadarma.

I was using Google Voice for a while, which is nice because it is free and never had any issues receiving SMS. A US phone number is required to activate, so I used a US relative's phone number to activate and then just disabled all the forwarding features so calls and SMS would never be forwarded to that number.

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.

GP here: I had the exact same experience with Google Voice (linked to my Skype Number several years ago). Sadly, I could never get it to work with another Skype Number again.

I've been using Gvoice pretty much since it started. I'm just as surprised as you that Google hasnt killed it. The writing has seemed to be on the wall a few times but it's still around, thankfully.

When they semi-killed hangouts a couple years ago I thought for sure Gvoice was gone.

Google Voice is weird. It seemed like they should've killed it, but they just added a few minor features this week.

Somewhere we are going to get the novel about the quiet hero team anonymously keeping Google voice going all these decades.

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 felt like it was slowly withering until they rolled it into their business communications suite a few years ago. Now it is pretty much a proper part of Workspace.

I've used Google Voice as my primary number since 2010, and started using it before Google even owned it (i.e., when it was Grandcentral).

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.

I've used Google Voice as my primary number since 2010.

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 use tello.com. You can get eSIM and activate it while you are outside the U.S. If you won't activate roaming, sms and calling will use wifi calling.

Do you know how providers detect your country when using wifi calling? Mine says it's only valid while you are within the country, wonder if VPN would work around it.

No idea, but Tello always worked outside of the U.S - Lithuania in my case.

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.

This is the major way roaming is implemented, transferring all data through your home network greatly simplifies things.

They can detect your country by IP address. Also AFAIR your cellphone sends CellID and/or location with every wifi calling connection attempt.

Tello costs at least $5 / month though. Skype was jusy pay as you go.

I pay $6.5/month for the number. It is pay as you go for calling but you have to pay for the number.

TextNow, $10 a month

Try voip.ms. Incoming texts can be sent to you as an email. A US number costs about $1.50 a month.

I use Groundwire as the client for voice and SMS.

Does this work for Claude? I have a Google voice number, and Claude rejects it.

Seconding VoIP.ms - they're great. Calls are billed at about 1c/min depending on if they call you (DID) or you call them.

I have the same problem and I want something as straightforward and un-scammy looking as Skype. And no, I don't want to configure some SIP client or some stuff like that.

jmp.chat should, though I have no direct experience with it outside the US for long periods of time, I can't seem them caring.

End of an era, but the writing was on the wall.

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.

> actively harmed by US tech giants

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.

Nope, Nokia was killed via suicide-by-microsoft-exec. They took in a MS aligned CEO and promptly proceeded to destroy their own chance of competing (using Maemo/meego or android for their phones) by using MS operating system.

I guess one could call it leadership stagnation, but I would argue more it being just plain old stupidity

Microsoft did not buy or kill Nokia though.

I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated. There was a vibe of “things are going to change around here, no more free rides, the grown-ups have arrived.” Awful management decisions were made, most of the talent left, and the team from the original company now only exists on paper.

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.

> I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated.

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-...

> Americans are just like the unofficial President -

̶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.

I assumed GP was referring to Musk. No one voted for him, but he can crash a presidental press meeting to ramble about DOGE propoganda.

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.

Yeah I agree parent meant Musk. It really is bizarre the power he's been handed. Crazy the party that supposedly backs 'small government' is fine with that even if it takes the form of an unelected fool billionaire being given unreasonable amounts of power and doing nothing but causing damage.

> You mean Trump?

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.

Oh yeah, I should have gotten that!

> You mean Trump?

That's the official 1.

Yeah should have figured parent meant Musk, I've referred to him as President Musk enough times to make the same point.

>Walmart employees are required to stand in formation and chant, “WALMART! WALMART! WALMART!” while performing synchronized group calisthenics.

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.

> 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.

>unofficial President

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.

"unofficial President" is mschuster91's oh-so-witty way of referring to Musk.

And he was elected by both the popular vote and the electoral college.

I too have worked for a European company bought out by a large American company.

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.

What both of you are describing is just what normally happens with MOST acquisitions (regardless of the nationality of the acquirer).

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.

What I gather about the differences between American and European attitudes towards work hours and vacation leads me to believe that there's actually a material difference between American and European acquisitions. I'm certain that new Euro bosses don't walk in expecting to be able to pull everyone back from summer holiday on a whim, but I've heard of just such a thing happening when we Americans rolled in.

> If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype.

Yes, it was used as a backdoor to scrap user data when the computer was not in use. That's why i uninstalled it.

Anecdote about MS and Skype.

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

> 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.

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

Who said they were government owned though?

Stagnation and risk averseness is pretty much the default when it comes to most major European companies. In almost any sector.

Not true, just some cheap internet meme for people too lazy to bother understanding economics and different principles US and European societies and markets work on.

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

> different principles

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.

"microsoft killed nokia"

nokia did that to themselves, microsoft aquisition just prolonged its inevitable ends

Sure, though if you strangle a junkie about to OD, you still strangled them.

Loved my yellow Lumia 920. I thought the panels and scrolling start screen was much better (concurrently used Android and iOS at that time).

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.

absolutely the fact they just give out on hardware side eg:nokia,surface device,zune,vr headset etc is just disappointing

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

If I remember correctly, the CEO at the time Steve Ballmer said they were betting the farm on mobile and ARM-based tablet computing. They went very hard on mobile until SatNad came along and killed it.

(Former Touch Diamond user here.)

And here we are, in a world where Apple has made arm work wonders for them and Windows still isn't really a thing on ARM 10 years after ballmer resigned.

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.

Windows is definitely on arm. It just sucks because Qualcomm failed to deliver a good cpu package. The experience is within a stones throw of Apple, though.

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.

Yes, it is on arm and has been for decades in some form, but it's still nowhere near its M1 moment.

I think the bigger issue is legacy software on Windows. It is Windows biggest moat and also their biggest albatross. So many companies and individuals rely on a specific piece of software that will never be ported to ARM. Microsoft can’t force the conversion. Developers have no incentive to support both until there is a critical mass of users and there will never be a critical mass of users unless ARM is 3x better than whatever Intel / AMD can deliver. On mobile it got close for a moment in terms of efficiency and then Intel and AMD immediately closed the gap. No incentive for users to switch.

They really should do a clean slate OS where native apps are all C# and legacy stuff is run in a VM. An ARM Xbox would also help develop a gaming ecosystem without the massive legacy concerns.

But then they lose their moat. Why not Linux then? Why not Mac OS?

Relevant: Singularity/Midori (2003–2015)

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...

You bring up bad memories. I fucking hated my htc touch diamond. It was pretty but man was it slow.

That was the funny story - Nokia got it's latest CEO (Stephen Elop) from M$, successfully almost-destroyed company, got it acquired by M$ and hopped back to M$. So, probably, it was the plan all along

why do you think this is happen in the first place???

the Board and Shareholder knew that it was sinking ships so it want cashout to Microsoft at least before its going to rubble

Exactly. There's a business reason hardware companies like Nokia got killed (because it wasn't just Nokia. Lots of telco hardware companies were making handsets before and aren't anymore). That seems to me to be that Nokia didn't know how to make $100/user/year by controlling the software like MS and Google do (MS with "enterprise" sales and ads, Google with ads)

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.

I think you just hating and out of touch with reality (if this is not satire) cause how much less substance this comment are

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

Yeah sales speak for themselves

Yeah I don't agree with the tone of this comment but the substance is correct. I didn't own a Nokia phone, so I can't speak to that. But Blackberry died because their phones just plain sucked. Even before the modern smartphone era they were unpleasant to use, but at least they were enabling something that nobody else did. But once the iPhone came along (and Android after that), they had competitors who were flat out better than them in every way.

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.

Not true. Nokia was already dying. Microsoft made a bad attempt to save Nokia when the heart had already stopped.

Same for Skype.

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.

Microsoft planted Stephen Elop to make sure they kill all their effort at a modern mobile OS so they end up using Windows Phone.

That was almost the Dr Doofenshmirtz "if I had a nickel" quote

Skype got me through my first few years living in a different country from my family/friends/girlfriend/enployer.

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.

> It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged it.

It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged a lot of products. It genuinely makes me think they're aware of it at this point.

Skype for Business UX > MS Teams UX

But Skype for Business isn't even Skype. Wasn't it just a rebranding of MS Lync?

Yep. For the first few months after the rebranding, you could change a Windows registry setting to get the old Lync interface back.

Lync because Skype for Business, yes.

Which became Teams (somewhat).

All the telephony side of Teams is very clearly Lync in a trench coat.

Yep.. in almost every way it should have beat out slack. It did everything better, and had a name. It was so very close, but lost. Mostly I think because of how hard it was to get non-users into it's eco system.

wdym non user?? it integrate nicely with windows eg:for sometimes skype installed by default on windows

We were one of those companies. I remember that you had to alter the order of users added to a group in order to have multiple groups (the equivalent of "channels") with the same member list. We'd use that trick to essentially have per-project channels. It wasn't necessarily super graceful, but it mostly worked.

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.

I’m loving this: it’s a complete misfeature that anyone can point out is conceptually just wrong, but also implemented so incompetently there’s a workaround.

"Microsoft mismanaged it."

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

Teams is a heavyweight behemoth with awful UX while Skype orginally had a very lightweight feel to it. Of course, Microsoft had to kill that through various UI "improvements".

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.

>NIH at its best

How do you know?

Teams feel totally different from Skype, from design perspective

Teams is just Skype for Business which was just rebranded Lync.

They never were at all related to Skype which was based around p2p phone calls, not group chats or businesses.

the design is a re-skin of Skype for Business. The app is way more bloated now, so there is an additional pane of options for things like team-only chats, task tracking etc

The award for the most absurd "UI improvement" must go to the Skype iPhone app that was painstakingly rewritten so that it felt like a Windows Phone app, complete with gestures that didn't make sense to iOS users: https://www.neowin.net/news/skype-for-ios-completely-redesig...

It was actually technically impressive, just...why??

It's a funny kind of myopia that causes companies to generate 'consistency' in ways that only make sense internally rather from customers' perspectives. 100% of Skype on IOS users interact with other IOS apps, vs some considerably smaller amount use Skype on Windows Phone or even Windows Desktop. When the conventions disagree the choice should be obvious...

Damn, this is the primary way I talk to my parents and my grandmother.

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.

Why not just use something like Google Meet? You send a link and the other person just needs a browser.

It's a pain to deal with syncing issues on Signal Desktop.

Google Duo (might be lumped in with Meet now) worked well for me when I was on Android and everyone around be was iOS. It's cross platform and worked out of the box.

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.

Google Duo is gone. The functionality has moved to Meet, causing much confusion for non-technical users and annoyance for everyone.

I miss when Hangouts had all the functionality in one app. Google's stupid bonus incentives just killed it all.

I gave my grandmother an old iPad I had. It’s been amazing.

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.

I would make the jump to Signal. It's super easy and secure. Has all the features you'd need (minus the online status). It's how I communicate with my whole family.

I use Signal, and I've gotten my parents to use it for texting as well, but I don't think that they have used Signal desktop.

That's likely what we'll end up using since I've already onboarded my mom and my dad on this.

WhatsApp works well for most people and runs on any device.

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.)

If your grandmother happens to have a Google account already, Google Hangouts. [1]

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?

[1] https://hangouts.google.com

Actually I just realized my grandmother doesn't have a smartphone of any kind, so I think Signal is out regardless.

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.

I mean, Signal works as TOFU if you're not sharing state secrets or anything.

> No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out,

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 was looking into it, and it looks like there's a free version of Teams. I think that might be the easiest to get them to onboard to simply I suspect it'll be easier to talk them into something with the "Microsoft" branding.

I hadn't really thought about scams. I'll keep that in mind.

FaceTime requires the initiator have a Mac.

Mac users can call others. Others cannot call Mac.

Yeah, and I don't have a Mac computer anymore, and neither do my parents or my grandmother.

I coordinated with my parents, we're gonna try the free Teams thing.

Exactly wrong in every way. FaceTime requires the Mac or iPhone or iPad user create a link. It's a regular (persistent but revokable) link to a web page with javascript and shit, but anyone can click the link which initiates the call; Others can call Mac, it's Mac which can't call others.

> FaceTime requires the Mac or iPhone or iPad user create a link.

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.

> Yes, FaceTime requires that the Apple user initiate.

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.

signal also allows you to turn off discovery by phone number.

My parents and grandparents are non techies and don’t have a lot of experience but they can make whatsapp calls easily. It takes bit of getting used to though.

Whatsapp voice/video calls?

Yeah, it used to be how she kept in touch with her family. Now most of them are on WeChat but once in a while we dust off the credit she still has and use it to call someone she doesn't have a WeChat contact for. The last time we used it the experience was bad--wouldn't stay signed in, multiple annoyances in the way of simply making a call. You don't need to tell us every time that 911 won't trace properly!

When Microsoft acquired Skype (the company), it was clear they would kill it. Skype had previously been bought by eBay, for which it served the purpose of entering a new market. Then, it was bought by some investment funds, for which it served the purpose of making money. However, to Microsoft, which already had its Windows/Live messenger (which copied Skype’s homework anyway), Skype served no purpose except to remove a competitor. They did not have a reason to develop it.

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.

I am not even sure if Microsoft was interested in the technology. I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network. I believe Microsoft replaced this way of working shortly after acquiring Skype. Perhaps on behalf of security agencies.

Perhaps. I would more readily believe that if Microsoft didn't have an established pattern of killing competitor companies and tech.

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.

I seem to recall that Skype had the concept of "super nodes" which could facilitate NAT traversal for of users which didn't have a direct internet connection. Microsoft got rid of that pretty fast and replaced it with Microsoft managed servers (which to be fair seems less sketchy that using random users machines as something akin to a STUN server).

> I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network.

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.

This approach to technology has serious problems. I would send a message to someone and turned off my computer, thinking that the message would be sent whenever the recipient was online. However, that was not the case. The message only arrived when we were online at the same time. Therefore, Skype is completely useless as a tool for asynchronous communication, for the main type of messaging!

Maybe, but somehow it didn't matter very much back then. I remember using private chats mostly as an addition to calls, i.e. when I wanted to send someone a link or a file I was talking about. If I wanted to just send a message to someone regardless of whether they were online, Skype wasn't really an option I considered, it was ICQ, later VKontakte, and now Telegram.

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.

This is true if you were young and hanged around other teenagers.

But when communicating with family or with business contacts Skype was the main way, incl. when it came to instant messaging.

I'm pretty sure that's how most, if not all, instant messaging services worked 20 years ago... Was a feature, not a bug. The whole idea of sending an instant message. If you wanted to send a non-instant message, you'd send an email instead.

ICQ worked more like SMS. You could send a message to someone who's offline. It would get stored on the server and delivered when they come online.

That' not true. Icq and other messengers (don't remember the names anymore) had async messaging functionality and that was expected.

We take the modern internet speeds for granted, at that time the tech behind Skype was top notch and probably when Skype made its way into Windows, that looked like the original destination. But later many questionable decisions made things worse even before the internet became faster and other voice technologies were up to the task. One of them was changing the protocol that made many headsets bricked. Probably from the marketing point of view it was a "if one wants Skype, he or she would buy Windows" step, but obviously it was not

Live Messenger (previously MSN Messenger) was another massive fumble by Microsoft. It was absolutely essential as a teenager in the 00's and people spent insane amounts of time on it. If MS put out a 'dumb' phone with Live Messenger they might have stood a chance when smart phones came around.

They had an iOS app that surprisingly few people knew existed.

https://www.macstories.net/iphone/microsoft-releases-windows...

I had a few dumb phones that IIRC supported MSN messenger pre-iPhone. They also often supported AIM and even sometimes Yahoo messenger.

I put $10 on an account over ten years ago to make sporadic calls (e.g. customer service in other countries). That account still has $5 left, and I’ve made a ton of calls to many different countries.

What’s a good alternative here? I just want to make outgoing international calls cheaply.

Especially an alternative that doesn't mean giving money to Google or using any Meta service.

SIP providers. I used Ippi before 2015, but then EU regulations made it illegal to bill more for EU calls than for domestic calls, so I had almost no more use for it.

I use MobileVOIP, but voice quality and the probability of a call to connect is inferior to Skype.

30-50 cents per minute is very expensive.

Checked prices, Skype is more expensive.

I'm in the same boat, I wonder if you can use the web interface from a 4g modem to make calls/send&recieve SMS messages. Could install a cloudflare tunnel on it and access it while abroad.

I know you can do sms messages, but I'm not sure about calls.

Perhaps an old Android phone could be used for this?

Nearly same situation here. I recently used it to for travel logistics for a trip to Japan for some local things that didn't have online booking.

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.

Seems reasonable. Rates are more expensive than Skype (almost 2x for some of the destinations I probably want to use), but not catastrophically so. I’ll chuck a tenner in and see how it goes :). Fingers crossed that can last me another decade.

It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid. They already had everyone and everything in place! But the app is a buggy mess, far worse than Teams, and they just refused to do anything about it.

I guess MS-internal politics? They had their own Teams and that was the preferred product?

The codebase is reportedly the biggest mess and impossible to navigate. In that light is just crystal clear why you would want to reinvent the wheel.

They’ve rebuilt popular software many times over in the past.

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.

> They’ve rebuilt popular software many times over in the past.

Ironically, I think this list includes Teams.

The calling functionality of Teams seems to be based on skype.

(if strings, binary layout and even some subprocess names are to be believed)

Can confirm, as a Teams and Skype protocol reverse engineerer for Pidgin, that most of the Teams protocol including text messages started as Skype (not the decentralised one) and has had additional layers of stuff added over the years on top. The calling for both Skype and Teams still uses a websocket with a "reverse webhook" called Trouter, which lets the client respond to events as if it were a webserver responding to webhooks, and then does a handoff to WebRTC. When I first started writing the Teams protocol plugin for libpurple, it was easier to start with the Skype plugin than to start from scratch.

they had to rebuild it, original Skype was written in delphi

No conspiracy neeeded. The simple reasons they bought it was:

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.

> they just refused to do anything about it

Whenever I reboot my computer, Skype installs an update.

It was 100% the preferred product. AFAIK Skype was deprecated internally well before COVID.

If it was only Skype, Windows development has turned into a mess, it appears teams are filled with newly grads, without any background on Windows development, or Windows developer culture.

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.

This is why they tried to remake the Windows interface to be more Mac like as well. What a disgrace.

I imagine internally they have a hard time staffing the Teams project. Like VSCode is a WebView2 project but it is miles ahead of Teams in quality. At least on the client side features seems far more complex too.

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.

It was also React Electron for a while, but that isn't the only issue with Teams, even if we comparing them running as pure Web application across browser tabs, Teams, Slack, Discord,.....

I really don't know what the Teams team does all day long.

Dealing with old crappy codebases can really tank a product, especially if you don't have management support to fix the broken practices.

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.

> It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid.

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.

Microsoft help pages claiming that they will not refund your unused credits if your card has expired or details changed. So Microsoft effectively is taking all the users credit for themselves. Filing a complain with the appropriate EU regulator on this as debit/credit cards expire regularly and that's just an excuse for Microsoft to take your funds.

Legally I'm sure they're covered. We've probably purchased non refundable "credits" that just happen to show in a format that resembles money but absolutely aren't money or exchangeable for money.

It's not their first time at taking our unused money, sorry credits

Microsoft killed Skype for me a few months ago: the Linux version simply stopped working, and unless I install a Snap-based one (which I cannot do remotely on family computers), it's now useless.

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.

Skype was very useful to call landlines from or two countries e.g. Europe to India. To my knowledge, Whatsapp et al do not fill this niche.

Is there another solution that has this functionality?

SIP providers, such as Ippi.

I use MobileVOIP, but voice quality and the probability of a call to connect is inferior to Skype.

I used to use Skype to call my grandfather's landline back home, until he passed away two years ago. I just opened Skype to scroll through our call history all the way to 2018. It will be gone soon just like he did.

Used to, now they are kinda expensive (as most of providers).

yeah my Skype credit has been quietly gulped too but officially you can reactivate it when needed

It's still possible through website. Makes me wonder if they will refund me mine.

> unless I install a Snap-based one (which I cannot do remotely on family computers)

I find that surprising - you could do something like "snap install skype" from the command line. Do you not have remote command line access?

And the amazing algo that made skype work as a P2P system with very little bandwidth circa 2000 is now lost. Locked down in Microsoft's proprietary attic gathering dust while each conf app gets worse as the time goes by.

I'm one of the apparently few people still using Skype, had the same issue with Skype just no longer working one day. But I was easily able to install the Snap package remotely on both my parents' laptops, wasn't any harder than any typical remote install.

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.

Oh, that will be hard for my grandparents and some overseas family members. Someone managed to teach them Skype at great effort some years ago and it's still the main they use for video calling to see their grandkids. Probably will need to try teach them Google Meet or something instead, but they're not the most receptive to new tech.

Jitsi Meet.

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.

>Microsoft will honor existing Skype credits, but it will no longer offer new customers access to paid Skype features that allow you to make or receive international and domestic calls.

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've started using Viber, but it's full of ads and more expensive

I just deleted it from my phone, yesterday. I haven't actively used it in I don't know how many years; maybe briefly last year when traveling o/s and needing to make a landline call to a number back home, but other than that, pretty much no use for years, and lately all I've been getting was crypto spam group chats.

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.

Unfortunately, Skype was an easy way for people to easily call toll-free US and Canadian numbers while overseas for free.

(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'm still using it after starting on one of the early Skype versions. At over 20 years, it's lasted me longer than ICQ, IRC or an other messenger. Most of my contacts no longer use Skype but it's the primary way I contact my family and I can't think of an obvious replacement that would fully satisfy my use case.

The verb "to skype" means "to video chat with someone" to many many people, in the same way "to google" means to look something up online.

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.

I suggest continuing to use it. Your language habits are not the property of marketers and product managers.

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.

I'm surprised see Microsoft buying a competitor to only then shut them down at a later date. It's not like them at all to act like a Monopoly.

You had me there for a second. :)

"Teams for Consumers" The product name already is an omen on how "successful" this will be.

My wife and I still use Skype, primarily for chat, but sometimes video calls. I had Skype Credits, but I don't really need that anymore. The service has definitely degraded (like it couldn't deliver text in a timely manner frequently), but we never switched because despite its faults, it was comfortable enough. No way in hell I am going to use that garbage Teams. I am stuck using it at work and loathe it. This motivates to find a Free Software alternative to this.

Skype is still good as a video client, but where they really screwed up was chat history. The only way you can recover old messages is to infinite scroll until you get to the point you need. Search is largely useless.

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.

Lots of good times on Skype in high school. Plenty of 12 hour calls on that service for free, and I really appreciate that it was a thing. It was really solid for the time. We had so much fun buying $10 of Skype credit when we finally were old enough to get jobs and then prank calling people over Skype. Very juvenile, but that's what we were.

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.

Microsoft has sent out this email:

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.

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

Thanks for this I've not received the email yet. This bit is irritating

>To port your Skype Number, please contact your new provider directly. Learn more

Anyone got any recommendations on who to port to?

I have a number with VOIP.ms, which I use with Softphone app Zoiper5. I'm going to attempt to transfer my Skype number over. VOIP.ms has a "availability" tool and it indicates its possible to port it.

I would say Google Voice is fine. I ported my POTS number to a burner cell and from there to Google Voice (some technical reason for that runaround) and other than having to dump in $10 once to kick it back into function when it hiccuped it has been a free and useful app for years.

I just used Skype the other day. I still find it useful for certain things. Is it that these companies can't maintain a piece of software unless they see a way for it to grow and dominate the world?

Skype’s peer-to-peer architecture seemed like an interesting idea. I mean that’s the sort of thing the internet was supposed to facilitate, distributed communications.

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 forgot about that. It used to create a lot of issues in a shared house I once lived in, we had a housemate who left Skype running and flooded our router with junk packets.

Well, that sucks.

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.

Or in my experience, testing out some slight mis-dial 1-800 numbers to see what kind of fraud they take me to without it linking back to me).

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).

Looks like this is the address to export your chat history:

https://go.skype.com/export

MS was always going to kill Skype once they purchased it. One way or another.

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 remember how it ceased working on Linux once they bought it

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.

That all sounds like an issue with your particular setup more than with Skype. Just because that isn't how the Linux app works for most people at all.

Which thing? Relying on keychain to stay logged in, or bad startup performance, or the most recent minute-long freeze?

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.

I'm saying I think all the issues you are reporting, including the lag times and such, seem specific to your setup, maybe Sway specifically or Wayland. I don't use Gnome or KDE or have any keychain stuff installed, I run Alpine with Awesome, and haven't experienced the same issues you have.

Interesting. Thanks for the correction. Maybe I just dropped it then and never picked it back up. I remember the experience worsening and it was probably the time when other alternatives were propping up so I never went back to it.

Update: I just gave up and uninstalled skypeforlinux-bin. I’m fed up with it. After taking a few minutes to log in (if the window isn’t visible, it doesn’t progress much through logging out and in and all), it looked like everything was fine, but didn’t show contact presence status or display incoming calls, which is something I’ve seen happen once or twice, but those times it sorted itself out after a few minutes, whereas this time it hadn’t after ten minutes, and I’m just done with it. I only used it once a week anyway. Not sure if this is actual Linux client breakage, or bugs in the web tech part of the stack, or some combination.

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. :-(

Every time I'm forced to use Teams it's a chore. I was trying to find a way to set a virtual background or change camera settings, and it looks like it's only available right before you join a meeting. It's wild.

>I was trying to find a way to set a virtual background or change camera settings, and it looks like it's only available right before you join a meeting.

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.

It's not, you can do that under the video settings if you hover over the camera icon on the calling screen, or there's a device settings buried under the overflow menu as well. Haven't used Teams in a while, but I doubt it changed now.

They bought it to murder anyway. Consciously or cluelessly, does not matter to me. It was so sad seeing it becoming that useless piece of junk not resembling the Skype grew to be the centerpiece and workhorse of my communications, business and personal alike in its prime time. I was mad about this incompetent giant ruining it little by little, sometimes with a big hit to its stomach. RIP Skype, years and years ago. Only nostalgy left it on my desktop, and two (one plus one) rare contacts. Everything dies, then rots away slowly, it was painful to see that for Skype it happened not in this order.

How will I check if my mic is working now?

I assume this was a joke, but if you do want an actual way, I always used Audacity for audio tests.

https://www.audacityteam.org/

zoom.us/test

I'm gonna miss her

I feel like I’m one of the few people still using Skype. I’m using the feature where you can rent an international local phone number and people can call you on that number and it forwards to your phone (my family live abroad).

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?

I don't have any recommendations. I used to have a number like this but it seems anything aimed at being cheap and for individuals ends up attracting a bunch of nefarious use for the volume of legitimate use which ends up making the service not worth running for the provider. As such, I gave up trying to find one to stick with.

If you have some tech skills and want something truly cheap, set it up directly with twillio, they have a basic scripting thing that can allow you to forward calls and such (chatgpt can help there) and the numbers are at something like a dollar a month iirc.

I just installed Skype this week to talk to someone using Skype's translation feature. And it mostly worked okay too. Any recommendations for other products that can do real time translation decently well for free?

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.

I can still hear the ringtone.

I can hear the Skype ringtone clear in my head despite not hearing it in years. But I can’t remember the Microsoft teams one despite hearing it multiple times today.

This is a response to search query of a related topic (I know it doesn't directly address the topic of the posting).

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.

This is such great news. I had to communicate with clients and in some European countries Skype is expected. It's used for group instant messaging and it is awful compared to Slack/Teams. These users absolutely refuse to move off it so glad to hear they will have no choice. Skype sucked 10 years ago. With the vast array of better options available it sucks immeasurably more now.

That's unfortunate, I was still using as a cheaper option for international calls to landlines.

Is there any good EU alternative for this specifically ?

I recently signed up for Vyke when I couldn't get Skype to work for international calls. Worked well for me. https://www.vyke.com/

Isn’t Teams running on Skype at least in some part ? I noticed that sometimes teams urls or copied data from Teams contain Skype word.

Yes, this is correct (AFAIK). I think they basically bought Skype to build "Skype Spaces" which is basically Teams.

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

If true this will be another “we lost the browser war” “we underestimated mobile” story, and they will realize it only 10 years from now.

Feels like Google never built anything successful themselves after the Search engine (maybe GMail), but rather bought stuff that became successful (e.g. Google Maps).

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 :).

This reminds me of how Yahoo Messenger was silently a significant part of the oil trade, and its shutdown may have subtly made the industry more opaque: https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/oil-traders-prepa...

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.

Skype was great, until M$ bought it, and then it was all downhill. For some reason they removed the ability to have a personalised answerphone message. Why?

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.

I agree that it’s not surprising, but I’d suspect that the name and a lot of the infrastructure will remain in various places. As others in the thread have pointed out, Teams appears to use a lot of Skype’s architecture.

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.

[1]: https://dev.groupme.com/

My day-to-day computers have always been Macs. My use of Windows has been relegated to occasional specific devices, like a TabletPC sketchbook or a 3D workstation. I don't think I'd touched Windows in more than a dozen years when I got a gaming handheld last year.

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.

My user profile directory on my PC is `c:\users\efrea`, which is exceedingly annoying given my muscle memory typing out my username. I "fixed" this with a couple junction points (both `efreak` as used on my Linux systems, and my first name as was used on my previous Windows systems), because I frequently use RDP from my android tablet and autocorrect keeps changing it to my full username. This is the second annoyance after finding out early on that changing my username doesn't mean changing my profile directory name (at this point there's too much software and scripts with hard-coded paths, both locally and remote, to change it without leaving the junction).

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).

I don't understand why killing a "brand" you own is so important. Just repackage the existing product you mean to keep around and call it something else. How many other industries are ruled by rebranded bullshit that does what they used to and now overcharge by factor X?

Stop killing, make zombies work.

Teams has never been as good as Skype at calls, even in the very early days.

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.

Anyone knows of an alternative to Skype to make free calls to 1-800 numbers? I was keeping Skype in my back pocket during trips abroad for that exact reason (allowed me to get away with using data only eSIMs and still be able to call bank/airline if something happens).

Google Voice is pretty cheap for that use case.

Not available in Canada sadly.

It's not free but you can try the Burner app.

if you don't call 800-numbers often, it's a tiny economic cost...

This. And most importantly for me, Skype allowed to call using my numbers (for bank it will look like i am calling from my cell). Any other voip service would just put random number which will trigger additional security checks.

Would love to hear about service doing that

My banks mobile app has a Call Helpdesk button, which simply dials the support number with ',,,<long random number>' appended. That gets you into the fast-track queue and they don't need to ask any security questions as they know it's you. They don't look at the dialing number at all.

Another option you could look into is a mobile VoIP app like Acrobits Softphone or Groundwire with a VoIP SIP provider like voip.ms. The apps are a one-time purchase (~$6.99-9.99 last time I checked). Toll-free calls are free and the airtime from voip.ms is incredibly cheap (local calls start at $0.01/min).

I am still lowkey mad about how Microsoft handled Skype. They acquired a great piece of tech that was widely popular and used and they straight up butchered it. I was unable to fathom why version 7.2 dropped lists, when up at this point I was able to create lists of my contacts. I could not understand why when searching for someone using their name, the search results would show me people from other countries sharing a same name before showing me the person from my contact list. They bought it to degrade it and then destroy it, so that they could push for Teams. It worked, but from a consumer's perspective that was just disheartening.

You can really tell they abandoned it by the lack of references to Copilot on the website.

Funny that written summaries of voice calls are actually a really useful feature. One of those easy wins of applying AI tech: unobtrusive and useful.

I still use Skype to do international calls to my bank/tax office/government agencies when I am overseas. It's been indispensable, though their new model of buying a subscription rather than just having phone credits sucks

Long time coming. The only one in my social group who still used it was my wife - and just for the function to call regular phones. Calling family in the US/MX from EU was pretty cheap with the Skype credit option.

Absolutely wild that the entire world got locked inside their homes and everybody became a remote worker and that wasn't enough for Skype or Teams to get used. Embarrassing! and this is the end result.

I used Teams through most of lockdown. The developers were all on macs, and used slack for chat, so the only feature of teams we used was for the daily stand-up video call.

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.

They forgot Skype existed and everyone used Zoom. Then Microsoft scrambled and used their monopoly power in Windows to force Teams on everyone. Teams was not a thing until at least half a year into the pandemic.

Thats it. Public companies only think about their shares price and KPI. Only private/startup companies can build nice piece of software and have good product. Enterprise can only be fat and ugly

Over a week ago, I was trying to top-up my Skype Credits but I can't find that option anymore. Then I saw this news. It's their product, it's their decision, but I just want to say, it used to be a really good product. Skype brings a lot of good memories of the early days of online work.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsUyjzRIU9w - play it, thank me later.

WhatsApp is now the de-facto planetary telephone network. The only problem is that it can't call landlines unlike Skype. Is there a replacement for this specific functionality?

Usually Viber

That has been one of WhatsApp’s strengths, as it allows it to avoid spam calls.

My friends and relatives get spam calls every single day. I don't use WA so I've no personal experience.

It lost all hope when it demanded the same login as windows. No longer could I have a semi-annon chat tool. I didn't want a "one password for everything" experience.

Microsoft have not sent me an email about this. I still have $120 credit on Skype and a Skype-In number. Curious if they will give the credit back to me.

[Edit] My question was answered here [1].

[1] - https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/2...

This makes me wonder, are my old chats still around? Is there any tool to back them up? Skype played a major role in my life for a good while, which I'd want to preserve.

yes you can download your skype chats https://secure.skype.com/en/data-export

Thanks! I exported my data through this and it didn't take too long. Unfortunately this has the same issue as every other data export tool, in that it doesn't let you infer context in surrounding messages, it only saves yours.

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.

Skype chats used to be peer-to-peer, so older history would only be kept locally by the client. If you have backups of your user/home directory from that time, it might be recoverable. IIRC they were stored in an SQLite database, so it's not too difficult to export them.

Like CrossLoop yrs. Back buy it, to miss manage, then kill it...it was competition

The P2P aspect of Skype was really interesting. I remember there were even physical handsets you could buy that had Skype built-in, which I thought were cool. I remember seeing business cards with Skype username on them also. That's how popular the thing was!

It's honestly baffling how we're still relying on old PSTN/phone numbers to reach people in 2025.

I can understand this decision because even my own Skype account is a ghost town unopened for few months.

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.

Agonizing to see this, but not for any current love of Skype. Redesigns killed it, and so obviously at the time were going to kill it. Redesigns like this kill trust and familiarity in a product, eventually the Microsoft account upsell meant I could not even log in using my Skype username at one point. I'm a tech person, imagine a mom'n'pop suffering the same.

When did "consumer" become a word used by marketing? It's a technical term from economics and a role that is played by everyone at various points in their lives. Calling people "consumers" seems distasteful and I think betrays how Microsoft thinks about their customers. "Teams for Home" would have been a much more obvious and nice name.

We should appreciate their honesty.

I remember loving Skype before Microsoft bought it. I started using it very early on. It was amazing. I remember they had something like public groups (I forget the name). Think of it like a Twitter Space. I was in there every day.

Some people might remember "his highness from India". Good times arguing and listen to others argue with him.

There's the official post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/2...

Teams for consumers / home / whatever they're calling it doesn't even support audio calls or video calls (not even 1:1). It can literally only do text chats.

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 definitely supports both audio and video calls.

From my experience:

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.

Is there a replacement for my use case? Essentially I have two Skype numbers in different countries, and use Skype to receive/forward calls and also to dial out from them to those countries.

It never worked great to be honest, and I don't care about losing the numbers, but I'd like the functionality.

Just a decade or so ago, 'Skype' was the 'Kleenex' of video calling. Funny how fast tech moves.

Sad to see it go.

Was looking for alternatives (maybe DIY) and found this repo: https://github.com/eric-brechemier/how-i-replaced-skype-with...

We use Skype to make long-distance calls to relatives who only have land lines. (For reasons, gifting the relative an Internet-connected device and just using FaceTime is NOT an option).

I wonder what we will use once Skype shuts down - Google voice is also not an option (they stopped wanting our money years ago).

I still have clients who run Skype for Business on premises. It feels so ancient when I have to use it.

Great. Really not looking forward to helping my grandmother migrate, and possibly a bunch of her friends.

I have been using Skype to call my parents every week for the last 15 years... and i still do. It works!

Will we ever have communication tools more durable and predictable (with known and managed failure modes and privacy expectations) than paper mail?

Standardised protocol? independent of any single entity or subscription? readable without special technology? universal service infrastructure?

That is called email

It's amazing to think that there was a time when Skype was literally synonymous with web-based calls and text chat. It was a verb, like googling. First eBay (was always a terrible fit), then Microsoft (which could have made it the defacto standard), lost the plot.

Kinda hope they have a good way to migrate Skype numbers. I have one that I used sometimes when I don't want to give my real number. I have been meaning to look into alternatives. I think I can port it to some other provider, but haven't found one I liked.

New messengers are worse than old ones. You could sign up for Skype using just login and password and for modern messengers you need to provide at least a phone number, and if the trend continues tomorrow they will start requiring biometric data I assume.

When Microsoft took it over, I lost the ability to log in. Despite having many paid credits on the system. There were numerous issues like -- you couldnt log in if you already had a microsoft account under the same email in some cases.

That's kind of a shame, although the product has obviously been neglected, I still used it on mobile to make local calls over wifi while I'm travelling internationally. The app is... rough, but it gets the job done.

Literally every messaging platform Microsoft has ever created has always been terrible, and that remains true to this day. The only exception was Skype, which used to be good, but after Microsoft acquired it, it also became terrible.

It seems Microsoft is moving over from apps, desktop and mobile.

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.

Did Skype ever, like, actually work? I gave it a few chances over the years, but personally, despite living in an area with very fast broadband, it was always had quality issues. For me, Ichat and Hangouts always worked better.

Calls worked great for me, but it’s not been able to reliably show a contacts online status for years

Skype worked well a decade before Hangouts even existed. It then went through Microsoft's "reinventions" that basically rebuilt it from scratch.

I use Skype for online language classes. The good thing is that the chat window is persistent for the contact (unlike Google Meet). That means I can go back in history during a call and see the previous notes

I already mentioned it under another comment (so I probably look like a shill), but Telegram also has this functionality, all wrapped in a native (C++/Qt) and relatively efficient desktop client.

Well this is really sucks. What other cheap and reliable real-phone calling services are there with working CallerID?

Calling to airlines, banks and other institutions is still needed and I still use Skype for this from time to time.

Just waiting for an OSS Skype clone built on alternative infrastructure such as Twilio or jitsi meet under the hood haha

Honestly though, I'll miss the 2ct/min calls to pretty much any landline in foreign countries

Been using Skype Manager to handle numbers for a few accounts in our business. I haven't found info if it will be possible to migrate these numbers to Teams. Does anyone have info about this?

Seems unwise. I'd at least try to sell it instead. It's a very popular brand still. You don't just "kill" things like that - brands are very difficult to build.

The user base is what’s valuable, and Microsoft wants them moving to Teams. Selling it would undermine that since they would lose the users.

I don't think anyone would willingly move to that turd. Anyone who has to be on it is already on it.

Is there a good alternative with high-bandwidth, high-quality video? I just tried Discord, Telegram, and Element - they all compress their video quite noticeably into a blurry mush.

Zoom has some settings for HQ and “musician audio”. But to really do it right you need something designed for recording high quality - like riverside.

I use Skype for cheap international phone calls so I'm looking for a replacement. I have't tried it yet but Viber looks promising.

They can open source it.

Unless they also make the patents coming with it public, it would be of no use. As long as I remember, Microsoft has no good history of purchasing patents and making them public. Google has (vp7,vp8, Webm as an evolution). But probably some of the patents are expired anyway.

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

Lazarus guys will have a second new Year party.

Oh man I actually use it to get a US phone number... What's a better alternative for this? I like skype cause you can request a new one every time you wanted.

it’s not as user friendly, but VoIP.ms is cheap and powerful.

Thanks I'll give it a shot! 0.85/month is CHEAP!

I’m still bitter with Microsoft shutting down Wunderlist.

How does MS ToDo compare to Wunderlist.

It’s supposed to be the successor developed by the same team.

Ticktick was the closest approximation at the time of Wunderlist shutdown. Still solid, but haven't researched the market recently. I don't remember details about the Microsoft version except it wasn't good enough.

I highly recommend ticktick to anyone looking good tasks manager. It's one of those very few apps that just doesn't disappoint me and even though I have ADHD and hard time sticking to some system, I always come back ticktick.

After 14 years of neglect, I still prefer it to Teams.

So the only option for ad hoc communication between groups of friends (as opposed to more formalized corporate communication) remains Discord?

I remember Skype being a big malware vector, and did my best to avoid. I do think MSFT cleaned this up, but the brand was ruined for me.

if you're looking for an immediate alternative, the State of Utopia has just bootstrapped this p2p alternative using WebRTC. It supports voice, video, and chat and has no logging, recording, or analytics of any kind:

http://taonexus.com/p2p-voice-video-chat.html

Monopolies are holding back innovation in the US, and I think we will start seeing the affects of which in the next decade or so

You'll get nothing that works and like it!

The news is that skype wasn’t already dead

imho Skype wasn't the only huge opportunity Microsoft had to win space in the internet - and it wasn't only Messenger, but their social space they had along with it. In there you could post statuses (even with pictures!) and people could comment on those. Sound familiar...?

One thing that's really fun is getting inundated with spam from random accounts

"user sent Translation Request"

Ask HN: What app do I use for cheap international telephone calls, to actual telephone numbers, now?

Service: https://www.Callcentric.com, https://www.VoIP.ms, https://www.Anveo.com.

Client app: Groundwire, Bria.

Sure but since most of its components have been Frankensteined into MS Teams it lives on right?

I used it only to call landline numbers in foreign countries.

Is there any alternative today to do this?

hopefully next is Teams. Microsoft gave up building browser engine and for everyone's sanity they shall also try to stop building chat applications. Arguably Slack has its issues, but it's a world apart in terms of usability, UX, UI, etc.

How do you make phone calls then?

I really like Skype and have a ton of important contacts on it.

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.

Are there any reliable alternatives for international landline/mobile calls?

Microsoft killed Skype when they removed its peer to peer architecture.

I keep seeing this comment in the thread, but I don’t really understand it. Sure, p2p is cool for us engineers. But why the end user ever cares about it? Microsoft’s purpose is to sell the product to as many customers as possible. If the decision was made to axe the architecture to increase the sales… it’s not the wrong decision? For us, tech snobs, we can always find an alternative anyways.

> Sure, p2p is cool for us engineers. But why the end user ever cares about it?

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).

All the things that came later killed Skype’s business. We might not like them, but clearly average person has made different choices.

/me cires in Estonian

Possibly the first good double NAT agile protocol in widespread uae

Bring back CU-SeeMe! ;)

I will miss Skype. It has a special place in my memory.

What will happen to user's existing Skype credit?

Killed Skype? Didn't it just merge into Teams?

What is the alternative to do cheap calls abroad?

I use MobileVOIP, but voice quality and the probability of a call to connect is inferior to Skype.

If both users are using Chrome, you may try my Chrome extension:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eparto-virtual-phon...

I liked it when they made all the lines wiggly

Are they going to refund the existing credit?

Amazing how neglected this service was considering Microsoft paid billions. Are there companies that do acquisitions well without killing the thing they acquire?

What happened? It's kind of hard to fuck up a chat app. The Skype ring tone is iconic.

Don't forget MSN Messenger was discontinued/merged into Skype. So they fucked it not once, but twice. Literally handed over their dominant position in instant messaging for nothing.

Wait - what about MS Lync/Office Communicator? I don't remember if that was just a branding change of "MSN Messenger for Business" about the time right before the Skype acquisition, or folding in (and failing with) yet another IM/Video chat solution. So should the count actually be three?

That's Teams. MS Lync was rebranded as "Skype for Business" which was then rebranded as Teams.

Yeah, it's actually three, though only from a branding perspective. They did rebrand Lync/Office Communicator as "Skype for Business" for a bit, though I don't think there was ever any code shared and it was just a branding thing.

Honestly I think they simply don't care, and from their perspective they finally have gotten it right with Teams.

It was a p2p phone and video call app that Microsoft purchased when mobile phones started to take off. Phones cannot participate in a p2p network the same way a desktop can, so it had to be re-architected to use central servers, and they never got it to work the same after that.

Wonder if P2P networking is hindered by the hardware back then vs now. I can imagine now most phones could deal with P2P networking just fine.

Software wise though idk if there is limitations baked into iOS and Android that limit this

I vaguely remember they making unusable in some situation that many people wanted, and people drifted away from it.

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's quite interesting that despite chat and video messaging apps being those that should stick for long they actually tend to be replaced with relative ease.

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.

When I started my business, i needed a voip phone number and was already in Microsoft ecosystem so I went with Skype.

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.

Something needs to kill Microsoft.

Microsoft killed Skype years ago.

Why not use AI to make Skype successful?

Not adding AI, but have AI design, and execute the steps to turn Skype into a successful product

I honestly didn’t even know Skype was still alive I’m surprised it’s around to kill. MS Teams is so cemented in my own any anyone I knows world that it’s funny to think back on the days where Skype was here and everyone hated it.

Microsoft first completely ruined Skype in its usual way of implementing user-hostile nonsense, forcing you to integrate with the rest of its bullshit login system to use the app, and generally making what used to be a wonderfully smooth, useful communication platform into a mostly useless mess.

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.

So they Nokia-ed Skype. RIP.

RIP longmont potion castle

It's Teams now isn't it? Some of the links generated by teams still have the word Skype in them.

I'm not 100% sure but I suspect the canibalised the skype protocol in some capacity for Teams.

As far as I know, Teams evolved from their business product. Which went through multiple rebrands in a short time span, including Skype for Business.

Teams was "Skype for business" which besides branding had little to do with Skype.

perhaps they can open-source it for great good ?

What's disappointing about it to me is that Skype has been my "mobile" telephone for more than 10 years. Upstate NY has cell phone dead spots in it bigger than some European countries but go to a gas station with a tablet and Skype and it works great.

I'll take it!

Now I really hope Microsoft buys Google.

Why??

To facilitate both of their collapses?

Another Ars [dupe]

I still use Skype, mainly out of habit, but I guess it's finally time to move on. Telegram seems like the best alternative for me, but I wonder—what are others switching to? Feels like every few years, we have to migrate to a new chat platform.

Telegram requires permission to view all your contacts on iOS :)

So I refuse to use it now.

That’s fair, but almost every messaging app does this (WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, etc.). The question is: do you trust Telegram more or less than the alternatives? Personally, I see it as the lesser evil compared to some big tech options.

WhatsApp doesn't require contact permissions to work. Neither do other apps I use for messaging like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, or Snapchat.

iMessage sort of does, but that's only because it's more a part of the OS, which already has your contacts anyway.

Signal also doesn't (on IOS at least), I just set it up for my parents and it asks for specific contacts.

I find telegram is amazing for meeting people you don’t already know, especially in group chats or for having slightly more anonymity.

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).

"Embrace, extend, extinguish"

Considering that Microsoft has owned Skype for 14 years of its 22 year lifespan, I don't think that this applies here.

EDIT: I got this working, here is what AI can do for you today. It's only been 54 minutes since I posted the question at the end of this comment:

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.

Oh no! Anyway... Signal seems fine as a replacement?

Can you make landline calls internationally with it for cheap ?

No, Signal is compromized. Set up your Matrix server.

How is it compromised?

that's a troll

Signal is centralized, i.e. has a CEO and a bank account. Secondly, it is US based.

Signal was likely funded by State. Open Whisper Systems has a lot of shady connections:

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...

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