RIP Skype
microsoft.com
microsoft.com
At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas. We built 3 networks, in 3 countries, in a matter of hours to host Skype super nodes. Apparently Skype had gotten into a retry storm due to a cascading failure because too many peer to peer super nodes had been taken offline at the same time. I think that Tuesday was Windows update day and maybe that was the straw that broke the camel's back. The small list of hard-coded super-super-nodes couldn't cope with the deluge. It took 3 days to get everything back and running, and for me it was the start of a fun collaboration with the team at Skype and eBay who were always nice.
Skype had sold to eBay for 2.6B in 2005. I don't think much diligence was done, and it didn't work out as a great integration for eBay. Then Skype was spun out and sold to Private Equity in 2009. The internet tells me that 65% was sold for 1.9B but I think there was some kind of write-down involved too. And then Microsoft bought Skype for 8.5B in 2009.
So you can have multi-day world-headline outages, be from and based in the EU, and still have 3 unicorn scale exits! There's a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient you can make a business with a great product and good leaders.
I doubt those same conditions would allow for multiple unicorn horns in the modern era. You can't build a Skype-like surveillance network now; that horse has left the barn.
You can still do surveillance capitalism - its just not as valuable as it used to be ..
Surveillance capitalism today doesn't produce the same returns now that it did in 2005/7 ... there are a lot more players and a lot more work to be done to become a viable operation.
Besides which, the weaponisation of such surveillance networks is out in the open and there is a lot more resistance - for example, in Europe - to the idea of having this form of integration into the telecommunication networks of states.
It always amazed me. What did Skype have to say about a Thumb Drive. But the brand had a lot of trust. A lot of people appreciated how simple and reliable it was, and the fun blue interface was very comforting.
On the surveillance side, it was rumored that Microsoft bought Skype in part to do a solid for the US DOJ. DOJ would get a cooperative partner for lawful interception / metadata, while Microsoft might get some relief from their anti-trust woes. But all of the principals I've ever spoken to deny this as a motivation and nothing has come out over the years to contradict that.
I do recall Microsoft putting Skype in their ads org for a long time, but not much seemed to come from that either.
Not for me. I always regarded it as one giant security hole in an era when Windows was riddled with them.
Depends on the market reach. A product struggling due to scale (a good problem to have: Like WhatsApp c. early 2010s during New Years) and a product that mostly does not do what it should (the very many dead WhatsApp clones) are very different things.
> a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient
I remember the time Skype was pre-installed on popular Androids (including the Kindle Fire) and yet couldn't compete with the likes of Viber, Kik, LINE, WeChat (which also came pre-installed). Think MSFT was that soft landing that broke that resilience.
> So you can have multi-day world-headline outages ... unicorn scale
I mean, us-east-1 is a prime example ;)
https://www.statista.com/chart/1417/skype-usage/
What is your criteria for stewardship ?
Skype under Microsoft had only seen sidelining and feature & platform regress, while it was a thriving product during eBay ownership. It may not be obvious from the bar graphs but it was apparent when one used the product.
More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?
It’s strange to me how companies take these huge messaging brands and then just burn them down (Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google’s chatbominations, even AIM). As a user, they don’t fizzle out due to user disinterest, it’s always the owner just sort of doing away with it for something new.
Is there just not a financial model here? Cheap to run and lots of users but no money. Skype seemed to be profitable back when I would use it for international calling.
AIM, Yahoo, MSN etc. were mostly plain text systems, built around presence and a single client. Then came mobile phones, with unreliable connections, with messengers which allowed integrating pictures etc. and easy sign up (iMessage by using apple ID, which every iPhone user has; Whatsapp by using phone number which directly linked the contacts), which worked without battery draining connection.
Skype originally worked by making random clients "super nodes" which coordinated the network, without needing a big data center managing it all. Making phones super nodes wasn't an option so they had to change their protocol in big ways.
So adapting was a cost and changed user experience, while newcomers grew.
In case of Google there was the addition of missing strategic leadership, where each team built their own new messenger, but nobody maintained any old one.
It speaks of the culture at MS really, but it's amazing how a revenue and cash rich company can keep a dogshit product going.
I despise teams, all my colleagues despise teams, all my friends despise teams. It's a product that all users hate with amazing uniformity. But MS bundles it with Office, which makes demure and uninspired IT departments use it because it's less work.
It is not the best, but it offers just enough and is good enough that you dont want to spend on a separate dedicated product.
Especially as teams comes as a part of a bundle and is integrated with it.
I hate skype's interface (the is just so bad, even sharing screen), I also hate the sharepoint integration, but reality is that if you look at costs you will use it
Different thing is that windows 11 taskbar now has space for 11 windows open.. wow this is bad for any officr work
Teams as a Slack competitor is abysmal. Absolutely unusable for anything other than the most basic communication needs.
If it was zoom -> teams, i don't think anyone would care so much.
Some people use these products to go through the motions of appearing to do work, and don't seem to be aware how ineffective they're being.
Whether MS office suites slot right in because the org is already dysfunctional, or whether the org is dysfunctional because MS office suites have made them that way over the years, I don't know.
I find Teams performance atrocious for modern standards. It's not great on W10, but on my Mac is horrible. The conversation buffer is abysmal, having to refresh a million times if you need to scroll up in the conversation history.
Most of my peers use windows, and have constant crashes, incorrectly identified input devices like mics and cameras, sluggish performance when sharing screens, etc...
Just a data point.
Specifically, they would offer Teams for free in a bundle with Office (which basically every company buys anyway). Every manager could strike Slack from their expenses, replace it with Teams and claim great success.
Microsoft has since been forced to change their tactics [2-3], but the damage is done.
[1] https://overcast.fm/+AAQ2lFdljEs/40:32 [2] https://www.ft.com/content/be838956-7038-4179-8a1c-851b83048... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/business/european-union-m...
It's a real shame, given that Zoom is leagues better than both solutions. But "free" is free :(
The UI is aggressively debouncing, so it won't search again unless I change the query.
The UI message is "We couldn't find any results in this channel. Check for spelling, try another search keyword, or search in another channel."
Looking into the network response, I see some fun JSON:
...
"error": {
"code": "OK",
"message": "The call failed, please try again.",
"target": "",
"details": [
{
"code": "OK",
"message": "The call failed, please try again.",
"target": "",
"details": [
{
"code": "OK",
"message": "The call failed, please try again.",
"target": "",
"details": [
...When did they care? Their business model is based on having their software forced upon users by clueless management and/or hardware vendors.
The story only repeats again though, like MSN messenger almost a decode before. Which one will be next?
If anyone’s looking for the same functionality without anything complicated I did some research and ended up with the Viber app. It’s a social network which you don’t have to use at all, and provides the same function as Skype Out to call regular phones.
https://cyberinsider.com/viber-messenger-abused-for-deliveri...
At FlyNumber we saw the decline early, we used to be able to point DID phone numbers directly to Skype accounts - it was great, of course Microsoft killed that around the time of their acquisition ... but why? All it did was force end-users to using SIP clients.
I think the EU were right with their antitrust case.
That’s the only thing we used it for (calling relatives who for reasons, are unable to get an iPad and use FaceTime like normal people). We’ve been struggling to find a reasonable replacement that doesn’t look sketchy. It also doesn’t need to be free, we used a Skype subscription so we are ok to pay a reasonable fee.
Viber and Rebtel have come up in my searches but I would love more opinions/options.
The couple times in the past 10 years I have had to to interact with an international business over an actual phone number, I used Google Voice.
(Google voice is not available where I live)
I had an account with auto top up from my card for years. I assumed they'd refund the unused credit when they closed but it seems they have decided to keep it which I feel is unsporting. About 15 euro so it won't break the bank but there should still be a general principle not to steal your clients funds.
"Just use Teams, your money will be there" ... hmmm, no thanks.
Indeed, I shall certainly miss the low-grade flood of spammers and scammers who slid into my DMs over the decades I wasn't using my Skype profile for anything at all.
Taking a general public lens here. For vidya, Teamspeak/Mumble provided better quality & latency but Skype remained king for its ease of ad-hoc calls until Discord blew it out of the water.
If we went back in time the only way to truly save skype would be to basically make discord and gradually replace skype with it, keeping the userbase. This would be way harder than just making discord because migration is harder that writing from scratch and getting that migration approved in a corporate setting is insanely hard.
I have (had) a +1-423 Skype number to receive calls (twice a month or so) that took messages that I could play in the Skype web-app.
Once you get it, you don't need access to that US number afterwards – very useful when traveling; everything just works via VoIP, including texting, which is a lifesaver for 2FA when traveling without US roaming.
Of course, it's a Google service, so expect it to be discontinued without warning at the exact moment you've totally integrated it into your daily life.
The instructions in the article say "Download Teams on your device" so that makes it sound like no...
It still sucks though, but it's just another website that suck.
Skype had quality issues, but at least it was easy to charge it and call. It’s got worse now with teams.
Microsoft is killing Skype
Yet another victim of M$