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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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 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
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
Yes, most acquirers bungle the acquisition (regardless of nationality), but the reason these companies decide to sell in the first place is because their future prospects on their own don’t look great.
Skype was a consumer success but consumers violently hate paying for software (just read HN).
The market for video calls-as-a-business is entirely B2B. Skype with their fun whimsical branding and non-sales dominant culture couldn’t hack it. Plus, big dumb enterprises hate screening new vendors, so Microsoft/Cisco/etc were always going to win that space.
Zoom basically swooped in later able to take all the learnings from Skype and go B2B from the start.
Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
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 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.
> 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].
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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??
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
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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).
In order to streamline our consumer communications offerings, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025. As part of this change, we want to keep you informed about important updates to your Skype paid services and how these changes may affect you.
Please read on for detailed information about the updates and what they mean for your services.
Subscriptions & Automatic Top-Ups: Existing subscriptions will continue to automatically renew until April 3, 2025. After this, all subscriptions will be retired and no longer be available for purchase, renewal, or reactivation. Automatic top-ups will end on April 3, 2025.
Skype Number: Your Skype Number subscription will continue to automatically renew until April 3, 2025 and will remain active until the end of your next renewal period. To port your Skype Number, please contact your new provider directly. Learn more
Skype Manager: Skype Manager users can purchase and renew paid products, including automatic credit top-ups, until April 3, 2025. After this date, only existing credit balances can be allocated to group members for calling.
For SMS services: SMS services will be discontinued on May 5, 2025.
Skype Dial Pad: After May 5, 2025, the Skype Dial Pad will be available to remaining paid users from the Skype web portal and Teams, where you will continue to be able to use your subscription or Skype Credits.
Terms of Use: Skype paid products are subject to the Microsoft Services Agreement.
Thank you for being part of Skype
We want to express our deepest gratitude for your support over the years. Skype has been an integral part of countless meaningful moments, and we are honored to have been part of your journey. Learn more about Skype retirement here.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amazing how neglected this service was considering Microsoft paid billions. Are there companies that do acquisitions well without killing the thing they acquire?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)."
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Makes sense that the SuperPeers core from Kazaa was re-used in Skype.
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.
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?
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Easier to monitor if centralised.
Yes, everyone and their Windows installs and their _NSAKEY guessed the reason was that.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
msmsgs.exe was p2p. Came with Windows 98, possibly 95. Video, audio, text.
Maybe microsoft forgot they made that?
Right, but that architecture falls apart in a mobile-first world.
Skype was perfect BEFORE the Microsoft acquisition. Everything afterwards was unnecessary. Source: I used Skype before and after 2011.
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
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'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) ?
"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.
I'd suspect the vast majority of France never has to worry about that type of coke, or maybe even knows it exists.
Coca cola, coca light, coca zero.
> 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/...
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.)
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
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.
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!
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
Digital cameras were mostly useless in the 80s and early 90s for rank and file consumers. The demand wasn't there.
Remember, Teams was originally "Skype for Business".
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.
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.
Slack is part of Salesforce now. Do I need to say anything else?
you're getting services for free and you call them cheap?
You may like to look at a self-hosted mattermost then.
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.
That's because "Teams" inside Teams are not part of Teams, it's tied to Sharepoint/Exchange and thus poorly integrated.
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.
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.
A message from the Skype CEO [NSFW]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E
That was great :)
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...
>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.
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?"
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.
huh? Microsoft massively leverage their market position and spread their teams application like the plague!
They just decided they like teams more then skype
Teams is used quite a bit.
Microsoft didn’t miss their opportunity with COVID, teams user base grew by the millions
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Zoom is widely used in US city and state government departments because of the ease of use and pricing, basically free.
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
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.
A deaf colleague massively preferred Zoom to Teams because the video quality on Zoom allowed a lot more sign language nuance to transfer.
It's entirely Zoom for my branch of academia.
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
> 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
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.
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.
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
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!
Telegram does that and also has a native (as in C++/Qt) desktop client, unlike almost every other messenger.
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"
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.
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.
Try voip.ms. Incoming texts can be sent to you as an email. A US number costs about $1.50 a month.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
VoIP.ms
TextNow, $10 a month
google fi
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.
"microsoft killed nokia"
nokia did that to themselves, microsoft aquisition just prolonged its inevitable ends
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.
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.
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.
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...
But then they lose their moat. Why not Linux then? Why not Mac OS?
Yes, it is on arm and has been for decades in some form, but it's still nowhere near its M1 moment.
You bring up bad memories. I fucking hated my htc touch diamond. It was pretty but man was it slow.
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
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 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.
Yeah sales speak for themselves
Sure, though if you strangle a junkie about to OD, you still strangled them.
That was almost the Dr Doofenshmirtz "if I had a nickel" quote
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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
> 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.
> 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-...
>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.
> 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?
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.
> 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!
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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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.
"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
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
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.
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??
>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
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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).
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.
Terms of Use: Skype paid products are subject to the Microsoft Services Agreement.
Thank you for being part of Skype
We want to express our deepest gratitude for your support over the years. Skype has been an integral part of countless meaningful moments, and we are honored to have been part of your journey. Learn more about Skype retirement here.
With gratitude, The Skype Team
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
This is why they tried to remake the Windows interface to be more Mac like as well. What a disgrace.
> 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.
It was 100% the preferred product. AFAIK Skype was deprecated internally well before COVID.
> they just refused to do anything about it
Whenever I reboot my computer, Skype installs an update.
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
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?
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 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.
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?
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.
I use MobileVOIP, but voice quality and the probability of a call to connect is inferior to Skype.
SIP providers, such as Ippi.
Used to, now they are kinda expensive (as most of providers).
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"Teams for Consumers" The product name already is an omen on how "successful" this will be.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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
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.
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
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
That has been one of WhatsApp’s strengths, as it allows it to avoid spam calls.
Usually Viber
Killed Skype? Didn't it just merge into Teams?
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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
Just a decade or so ago, 'Skype' was the 'Kleenex' of video calling. Funny how fast tech moves.
Sad to see it go.
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.
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
Are there any reliable alternatives for international landline/mobile calls?
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.
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.
After 14 years of neglect, I still prefer it to Teams.
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.
Skype worked well a decade before Hangouts even existed. It then went through Microsoft's "reinventions" that basically rebuilt it from scratch.
Calls worked great for me, but it’s not been able to reliably show a contacts online status for years
One thing that's really fun is getting inundated with spam from random accounts
"user sent Translation Request"
So the only option for ad hoc communication between groups of friends (as opposed to more formalized corporate communication) remains Discord?
I liked it when they made all the lines wiggly
/me cires in Estonian
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
What will happen to user's existing Skype credit?
Bring back CU-SeeMe! ;)
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.
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...
There's the official post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/2...
I have been using Skype to call my parents every week for the last 15 years... and i still do. It works!
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.
So they Nokia-ed Skype. RIP.
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.
Amazing how neglected this service was considering Microsoft paid billions. Are there companies that do acquisitions well without killing the thing they acquire?
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.
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
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.
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.
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'll take it!
Now I really hope Microsoft buys Google.
Why??
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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?
Signal is centralized, i.e. has a CEO and a bank account. Secondly, it is US based.
that's a troll