Microsoft retires to Skype in May, encouraging people to adopt teams

Skype is starting.

On Friday, Microsoft He announced that the 21 -year -old call and messaging service will close on May 5. The software company is encouraging Skype users to migrate to their free equipment application.

Skype earned attention in the 2000s for giving people a way of speaking without paying the telephone company, but stumbled on the mobile era and did not enjoy a great resurgence during the pandemic. Some people have forgotten that it is still available, given the many other options to chat and call.

“We have learned a lot from Skype throughout the years we have put in teams as we have developed teams in the last seven to eight years,” said Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 Collaborative Apps and Platforms, in an interview with CNBC. “But we feel that now is the time because we can be simpler for the market, for our customer base, and we can offer more innovation faster simply focusing on the equipment.”

In the next few days, Microsoft will begin allowing people to log in to teams with Skype credentials, and Skype contacts and chats will be transferred. People can also export their Skype data. The company will stop selling monthly Skype subscriptions, and credits can continue to use them in equipment.

“This is obviously a great moment for us, and we are certainly very grateful in many ways,” Teper said. “Skype was a pioneer in audio and video on the web for many, many people.”

It is one of the most durable digital brands.

In 2003, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, who previously co -founded the Kazaa file exchange program, Skype launched in Estonia with the help of a band of former classmates with zero experience in telecommunications. Originally, Skype was a tool for people to be called online for free. The peculiar name represented “Sky Peer To Peer”, a reference to the underlying voice of the service on the Internet protocol, or VoIP, architecture.

Skype realized quickly. For 2004, there were 11 million registered users. by the time eBay announced a Plan Buy Skype Technologies SA for $ 2.6 billion in 2005, the user count had reached 54 million, and Skype was anticipating $ 60 million in annual revenues, thanks to the payments of those who wanted to call mobile phones and fixed phones.

Meg Whitman, the EBAY CEO at that time, imagined that Skype would help people completely complete products sales, especially expensive, connecting buyers and vendors. And eBay could charge more for such calls. Skype users worldwide could discover EBAY and PayPalalso. The agreement was completed 29 days later.

Under eBay, Skype’s number grew, crossed 405 million in 2008, and increased communications income. But then Whitman resigned as CEO, giving way to the former Bain executive John Donahoe, who did not believe that Ebay’s main businesses benefited from Skype’s transaction.

In 2009, the economy was in recession, the growth of EBAY sales had become negative, and the price of shares was lower than it had been since 2001. In a statement which promoted the launch of a Skype application for Apple Iphone, Donahoe announced that Ebay would launch an initial public offer of Skype as part of a separation.

But Ebay never requested a Skype opi. Four and a half months after declaring OPI’s strategy, Ebay said there were reached an agreement Sell ​​Skype to a group of investors led by Silver Lake in an agreement worth $ 2.75 billion. The online auction operator received a 30% participation in the Skype buyer. According to the group of investors, Skype requested an OPI, but that didn’t happen either. Microsoft ended Acquire Skype In 2011 for $ 8.5 billion, with Ebay receiving more than $ 2 billion.

“Microsoft and Skype together will bring together hundreds of millions or, as Tony, billions of consumers and will train them to communicate in a new and interesting way,” said Microsoft’s CEO at that time, Steve Ballmer, in a press conferencereferring to the comments before in the event of the Skype leader, Tony Bates. At that time, 170 million people used Skype every month. Ballmer was aimed at integrating Skype with several Microsoft products, including Lync, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Phone and Xbox Video Game Consols. Microsoft also caused Skype to run in its Azure cloud infrastructure.

However, Skype failed to accumulate one billion active users.

Apple Imessage and Facetime native were collecting traction on iOS devices. In 2014, Facebook I bought WhatsApp, a mobile messaging application, and months later, users obtained the ability to make calls through the borders. WhatsApp worldwide. So did the Wechat of Tencent.

Skype, meanwhile, implemented multiple redesign and Criticality of devotees. In 2016, Microsoft Entracted equipment As a “chat -based work space” for organizations with office productivity software subscriptions that would compete with Slack, which was then an emerging startup.

When Covid came and pushed people to work and study from home, Zoomoriginally conceived for commercial use, it became a Consumer Favorite To celebrate video calls. People could also connect on video through services CiscoFacebook and Google. Skype saw an increase in use, but Microsoft put the main engineering resources behind equipment for companies, governments and schools, and the investment was worth it. Analysts began to concentrate on the number of equipment users that Microsoft will reveal, with the figure greater than 320 million in 2023.

As for Skype, the current CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, has not mentioned it in a profit call since 2017.

In 2023, Microsoft said Skype had 36 million daily active users. That was less than 40 million in March 2020. Teper refused to talk about how many people use the service today.

“I think that a good writing of the history of the thing would mark the change to mobile devices and clouds as a significant change in the communications category,” Teper said.

LOOK: What happened to Skype?