Microsoft To Shut Down Skype in May, Shift Users To Teams (xda-developers.com) 74
Microsoft said Friday it will shut down its Skype messaging service on May 5, replacing it with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers. Existing Skype users will have approximately 60 days to decide whether to migrate to Teams, where their message history, group chats and contacts will automatically transfer, or export their data including photos and conversation history.
The company will discontinue Skype's telephony features for calling domestic and international numbers, though it will honor existing Skype credits and subscriptions inside Teams until users' next renewal period. Skype Number users will need to port their numbers to other providers. Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011. The shutdown will not result in immediate job cuts.
The company will discontinue Skype's telephony features for calling domestic and international numbers, though it will honor existing Skype credits and subscriptions inside Teams until users' next renewal period. Skype Number users will need to port their numbers to other providers. Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011. The shutdown will not result in immediate job cuts.
p2p (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides becoming popular, the original skype was also decentralized and tried hard to make connections point-to-point rather than need to be proxied. Microsoft bought skype and centralized it a long time ago. Now there is nothing left. It was a long road to killing skype completely but Microsoft plays the long game.
Re: (Score:2)
Microsoft bought skype and centralized it a long time ago.
Do they not even do NAT hole punching between two parties in a voice/video call anymore? Having their own server as the coordinating node isn't a bad idea for security, of course.
Re: (Score:3)
It's a also a great idea if you view customers as data monkeys you can spy on for advertising/ai/whatever.
Re: (Score:3)
The skype protocol was a thing before standards like ICE, STUN and TURN. Yes, Teams does modern things that are now standardized.
When you need something like a directory service you have to ask yourself if you trust the service. Do you trust the protocol to run safely as the directory service on some user's computer? Do you trust Microsoft to run the directory service?
I understand Microsoft's position and reasons for centralizing but I don't trust Microsoft.
Re: (Score:2)
The long game? WHAT long game?
M$ bought Skype for $hitloads a while back. At that time, they had a few scattered operations some of which they were unsuccessfully trying to push and for business users the execrable Lync. I remember everyone suffering under that awful piece of software commenting that no wonder they bought skype hopefully they'll make Lync like skype.
Well careful what you wish for I suppose. That's exactly what happened: they made skype a complete piece of garbage and then cancelled it.
Anyho
Re: (Score:2)
And remember they bought Skype from eBay of all places that basically sat on doing nothing.
Re: (Score:3)
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Re: (Score:2)
It was a long road to killing skype completely but Microsoft plays the long game.
So it was the long game of MS to buy something for $8.5B to kill it? What did MS get for their money? Not much as far as I can see. Right after MS bought it, they started changing it. From what I remember, updates removed features and introduced bugginess. Users left in droves.
Re: (Score:2)
Skype is also good for calling abroad. Very cheap compared to most phone providers.
Reading the announcement it looks like the ability to call phone numbers is going away.
Re: (Score:2)
Reading the announcement it looks like the ability to call phone numbers is going away.
whatsapp. unless you want to call someone in china ... you ... traitor, you!
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Oh, can you make international calls with WhatsApp? I didn't know that.
Don't worry, I have WeChat for China.
Re: (Score:2)
The only thing left from Skype is the name, and the stupid cartoony sounds it makes all the damn time.
Everything else has turned into a Slack clone.
Re: p2p (Score:3)
The US government paid Microsoft to buy and backdoor Skype. The peer to peer nature of old Skype was a threat to US government surveillance.
Re: (Score:2)
They also bought Groove [wikipedia.org] and did the same to the decentralized platform. Can't have people retain control of their own lives, you know.
But that's a very deep cut.
Re: (Score:2)
But one has to say that with the end of the dial-up era P2P died a bit. Services are centralized because computers are behind a NAT and correct port forwarding isn't easy for most users and uPnP causes chaos. Sadly routers also firewall IPv6 addresses by default, so that you still need to configure your router before doing P2P again.
Re: (Score:2)
The problem was when Microsoft acquired Skype, Microsoft then got sued by patent trolls because that p2p method of connecting to the network was patented. When Skype was a small network barely ma
What happened to Skype? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I gave up on Skype around ~2005 to roll my own VOIP PBX and I never looked back since. Much more flexible that way anyway.
Re:What happened to Skype? (Score:4, Informative)
What happened is that Microsoft bought it. They didn't know what to do with it but they didn't want anyone else figuring it out. If Skype was still independent, though, they might have died out. Except Microsoft bought it from eBay and a private equity firm - I don't even know why eBay wanted it. Private equity doesn't always give a path to product success if you don't know how to monetize it yet.
In early COVID, Zoom was the better product. I think they had the better 3+ party video call. Microsoft made a mess of Teams (desktop client running on badly optimized JavaScript ((Electron)), later WebView). And Google Meet was probably fine but who can keep track of their product of the week?
Zoom let you just start using it without any salespeople. And free for basic uses, especially personal use where people can learn it on their own. Both Teams and Google kind of require you to buy into the ecosystem before you can do anything.
Re: (Score:1)
Oh come on. Video calls were commonplace way before Zoom. Everybody facetimed unless they were poor and used Android.
Skype is a real tradgety of corporate stupidity (Score:5, Insightful)
Skype was awesome in the early 2000s. There was nothing like it. I could have and should have dominated the mobile and internet messaging industry, especially with the backing of Microsoft.
But instead, MS bought it up so that it would stop competing with MSN Messenger. They starved it.
I hope they don't do the same thing to GroupMe -which is still awesome despite MS.
Are you new here? (Score:2)
Embrace, extend, extinguish - Microsofts de facto corporate motto.
They've tried to do the same to Linux but didn't understand the open source model so have failed despite their best efforts of trying to tie it and its users to windows with WSL.
Re: (Score:2)
Back in 2007+ I was working a lot with colleagues in Shanghai. Skype was the only thing that could reliably navigate the Great Firewall with its random behaviour as well as providing the only decent and cost effective tool for calling out of China to real phones back home. It was such an amazing, ground-breaking tool when it came out and cut my work phone usage immensely.
After Microsoft's changes to route everything through its servers, Skype failed a lot more with poor networks. They ruined the experien
Opportunity (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
268 MB now - which is insane for what it does (and it is using the WebView 2 external component).
What works well for calls these days? (Score:2)
So what works well for calling land lines, call centers, and cell phones in the US these days? Skype sometimes just doesn't work, so it's good to have a push to find an alternative.
Re: What works well for calls these days? (Score:2)
This is also my question. I am one of the remaining paid Skype users. Itâ(TM)s great for receiving and making calls to US numbers overseas. Iâ(TM)m open to VoIP number suggestions.
Re: (Score:2)
Google Voice still exists and can do all those things.
Downfall (Score:3)
Perhaps the biggest reason why Skype and ICQ both fell into irrelevance is that all the other major instant messengers switched to registering with your phone number and nothing else. People got too lazy to bother signing up properly and remembering passwords, but I will miss Skype dearly as it was the only IM that allowed you to find and talk to complete strangers. And I've used it a lot for international calls. I have never seen anything as cheap and efficient as Skype.
And don't get me started on the fact that Skype on Android, the most popular mobile platform, is absolute crap. It's a horrendously slow application where everything takes seconds to complete and it has major issues with notifications. You can actually see how the UI is being rendered on Android in real time, it's almost a slide show. Nothing that I've ever used on PC or mobile was this slow. That's inexcusable for an IM. Oh, and good luck scrolling back through chat histories. I just tried it today. Spent 20 minutes downloading a complete conversation with my friend. Constant "Loading..." No search function either.
Microsoft never embraced instant passwordless registration and never bothered to rewrite Skype using native interfaces for each mobile operating system. They basically let it rot and die. An $8.5 billion write-off, not counting all the money spent after the acquisition.
An extremely sad story indeed.
Re: (Score:2)
An $8.5 billion write-off, not counting all the money spent after the acquisition.
Not really. Skype for Business is what they started with when they made Teams.
Re: (Score:2)
Skype for Business was unrelated to Skype. It was the former Microsoft Lync/Office Communicator. They renamed it because of Skype's brand recognition or something. Teams wasn't based on Skype for Business, either. It was a new "cloud-based" product designed to replace the hosted version of Skype for Business. The on-premises Skype for Business server is still available with subscription licensing.
But that aside, was it really a waste of $8.5B? How much money have they made from it between acquiring it
Re: (Score:2)
It turned into a protective maneuver against Slack and Zoom encroaching on Office.
Businesses want Office. Businesses will always look at the "included" thing they already have usage rights to before paying another service provider. Bundling Teams with Office means deeper entrenchment for Office.
That's what they got for $8.5B. And I'm sure they've already seen the ROI.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
The first big Skype exodus I saw was to Facebook. In elementary we all had Skype, in hs everyone was on Facebook and coordination happened in Facebook groups. Meanwhile MS changed Skype to only hold the last 6 months of chat history (imagine FB Groups working like that).
Re: (Score:3)
Perhaps the biggest reason why Skype and ICQ both fell into irrelevance is that all the other major instant messengers switched to registering with your phone number and nothing else. People got too lazy to bother signing up properly and remembering passwords, but I will miss Skype dearly as it was the only IM that allowed you to find and talk to complete strangers.
I don't think that was it. It certainly didn't help, don't get me wrong, but I don't think that the phone number method was the sole, or even primary, reason for this.
I think that most of the IM services of the 90's had trouble making the transition to the mobile space. I'm hard-pressed to think of even one that managed to make the transition. Most surprising to me was AIM; they had mobile apps before smartphones were a thing - it was possible to use AIM on a Motorola Razr, and Cingular (later AT&T) eve
Re: (Score:2)
It's similar in China. Everyone uses WeChat, every business has a QR code for their WeChat account. Often no phone number, just the QR code.
Makes sense (Score:2)
FFS, Microsoft pull your head out of your own ass (Score:2)
Skype is a dumpster fire, it's seriously f'd beyond belief, it literally
Re: (Score:2)
If you assume a very low estimate of Linux / Unix systems running 85% of all computers
How many of those are running as deskops though? 4-5%? And how many of them are running Skype and want to move to Teams? Maybe .5%? You can always use the web app. The client is basically just a wrapper for it these days anyway.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The web version works perfectly fine. Again, the Teams app on Windows is basically the same
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
If you assume a very low estimate of Linux / Unix systems running 85% of all computers, which is honestly low
so is it finally the year of the linux desktop?
Skype is a dumpster fire, it's seriously f'd beyond belief
tbh, skype in all its novelty has always been very flaky software, even long before ms bought it.
if you go with Microsoft ... What serious alternative can we use now?
wait for it ... teams?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like a rather big business opportunity, costing not too big an investment in money and time.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The entire point is you can't use Teams, how do I use it on the desktop? I have to connect via the web portal, which is counterproductive to using a productivity-based communication software. It needs to stay out of the way, until I'm needed, and then be useful for some time, then go away again, and that should be entirely separated from having a browser open. We need to stop accepting web portals in place of proper applications because I don't want 90% of the work I do, to happen in the browser, I want it to happen natively on my system.
apparently the client for linux is a pwa. still a web interface but encapsulated in a standalone app which you can run on the desktop like you desire.
As for the other remark about the year of the Linux Desktop, I highly doubt Linux is going to overtake Windows on the desktop. The desktop market is maybe 1% or 0.1% of the overall market, perhaps less, so let's aim a little higher. If I'm on a server, I should have access to the same tools; otherwise they're not meant for productivity.
what productivity? that's the point i wanted to make with that pun of the linux desktop year: that 85% is basically server racks, and you shouldn't be using these kinds of desktop tools on a server. if you are a developer that needs to edit/compile stuff for that server and interface with others and whatnot you should have a separate development machine for th
Re: (Score:1)
The entire point is you can't use Teams, how do I use it on the desktop? I have to connect via the web portal, which is counterproductive to using a productivity-based communication software. It needs to stay out of the way, until I'm needed, and then be useful for some time, then go away again, and that should be entirely separated from having a browser open. We need to stop accepting web portals in place of proper applications because I don't want 90% of the work I do, to happen in the browser, I want it to happen natively on my system. As for the other remark about the year of the Linux Desktop, I highly doubt Linux is going to overtake Windows on the desktop. The desktop market is maybe 1% or 0.1% of the overall market, perhaps less, so let's aim a little higher. If I'm on a server, I should have access to the same tools; otherwise they're not meant for productivity.
You pretty much lost all credibility with your grossly underestimated statistic According to available data, there are significantly more desktops and laptops in the world compared to servers, with estimates suggesting that the ratio is likely in the hundreds of millions to tens of millions, meaning for every server, there are hundreds or even thousands of individual desktop and laptop computers in use globally
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Teams doesn't work on Linux or Unix
I have never initiated a call with Teams, but I have joined many Teams calls using Chrome on Linux.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
You can switch your calls to Zoom or switch your desktop to Windows.
Microsoft thinks you should so the latter.
It sounds like Consumer Teams (is there a more Soviet product name?) is a rebranded Skype but for fewer platforms.
Everybody gets burned by relying on Microsoft at some point.
Re: (Score:2)
I
Re: (Score:2)
If you're complaining about performance on a Lenovo ThinkPad T500 that was originally released in 2008, I think you're spending far more time trying to optimize for 17 year old hardware than it's honestly worth. For fuck's sake, it's a core 2 duo.
Otherwise, you might consider disambiguating "T500"
Re: (Score:2)
Didn't they already do this? (Score:2)
I recall Teams coming out, it was free, of course they wanted to get everyone on it.
It seemed pretty neat and invested time into it, tried setting up some stuff on it for my local cycling community, etc.. I'd already been on Slack a few years for work, and at the time seemed like Teams was trying to push the boundaries and offer some other neat features which was partly why I gave it a shot.
Then they went to monetize it, and much of this 'free' program was no longer free.
Guess what's supposedly coming back
Probably to suck data into Teams A.I.? (Score:1)
With diminishing Skype usage, this is a great way of sucking all the Skype conversation histories into the Teams A.I. engines without putting the development effort into Skype.
Heck, they'll automatically create a Teams account for you if you don't have one. I wonder what the A.I. permission defaults will be?
Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
first Teams, now Skype (Score:2)
Alternatives for calling phones (Score:1)
I've been using Skype from time to time when I had to call a regular phone abroad, as it was much cheaper than using my mobile. I'm in Norway. Are there any alternatives?
Re: (Score:2)
How about existing credits? (Score:1)
man, that's bad (Score:2)
One thing I relied on Skype to do was support calls to US toll-free (800) numbers from abroad. That saved my patootie a number of times. Will need to find another means to do the same thing, now.
Anyone have suggestions?
is it before or after Win 11 transition? (Score:2)
Typical Microsoft (Score:2)
Typical, but Microsoft has learned a lesson (Score:2)
Just as they always used to, they bought a cheaper better would-be competitor before it could rise to actually be competitive and then killed it. Nothing new of different in this. After the anti-trust fights they got into years ago, however they have seemingly learned to do it better. This time, they bought the upstart, and let it operate for years as a new and improved Microsoft provided thing before whacking it. Long enough for government regulators and congress critters to not notice and not care. Plus,
How about a refund for Skype credit? (Score:2)
Every year for years, I get a message from skype saying my balance has expired (ha, what a concept) and I need to re-activate it. I used it maybe 20 years ago when skype was the best way to make overseas calls. It's not much, maybe $20. But they've had and the interest it made them for nearly 15 years. The honest thing to do would be to return the money to me. But no. Just transfer it to teams for one year after which they take it outright.
lame, the one things besides windows that MS had (Score:1)