"Skype is closing down. Microsoft, which acquired the messaging and calling app 14 years ago, said it will be retiring it from active duty on May 5 to double down on Teams. Skype users have 10 weeks to decide what they want to do with their account.' Like I said It sucks but we will live. Now they continued with saying "It’s not clear how many people are impacted. The most recent numbers that Microsoft had shared were in 2023, when it said it had more than 36 million users a long way from Skype’s peak of 300 million users."
That went from 300 Million to just 36 Million which is still a lot but it also becomes clear that people have found the system flawed long ago and have begun to move on. Skype while it features A LOT of cool stuff like the RECORDING features and stuff the system is full of bugs and always has been in one way or another. Either way I'm going to be sad to have to move on as it's been what I've used from day 1 when I started my shows some 15 years ago.
The news will come as little surprise to those who have followed Skype in recent years, and in many ways, the writing has been on the wall since 2016, when Microsoft debuted Teams. While Microsoft had launched a specific Skype for Business product in 2015, Teams’ arrival signaled a new direction for Microsoft in the cloud communications space. Many likened Teams to a Slack clone, but the bigger ambition was to build a platform that would give space for collaboration and communication across a wide range of Microsoft and other apps, and that included video and text chatting a direct overlap with Skype. Microsoft then revealed plans to phase out Skype for Business in 2017, concluding those efforts four years later, in 2021. That same year, Microsoft selected Teams as the integrated communications app of choice on Windows 11, relegating Skype to the sidelines. But I wonder if this just means no more updates but the Skype we got now installed on a Windows system and not browser based will still be able to let us use it?
Microsoft is encouraging users to move over to Teams Free. This offers some additional features not available in Skype, such as calendar integrations, but Teams Free lacks other key features that were hallmarks of Skype specifically, phone-call functionality that allowed users to call mobile and landline numbers, as well as receive phone calls with a Skype phone number.
