Microsoft To Shut Down Skype in May, Shift Users To Teams (xda-developers.com)
- Reference: 0176569823
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/02/28/1426223/microsoft-to-shut-down-skype-in-may-shift-users-to-teams
- Source link: https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-killing-skype/
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 [2]acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011 . The shutdown will not result in immediate job cuts.
[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/microsoft-killing-skype/
[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/11/10/14/1157230/microsoft-finalizes-skype-acquisition
What happened to Skype? (Score:2)
I remember having a Skype video call with someone a few years before COVID. Then during COVID everyone kept talking about Zoom calls as if it was a brand new thing, and how lucky it was that this technology was invented just in time for lockdowns. In reality it was just clever PR from a software startup. People still say "jump on a Zoom call" when they're actually using MS Teams or Google Meet.
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.
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.
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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:2)
Seems like a good opportunity to dump another Microsoft technology? The last time I had to install and uninstall Teams, it was something like 6GB. Not that size matters, but...WTF.
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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.
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.
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> 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.
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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: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).
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> 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
Makes sense (Score:2)
It makes sense, even though for some reason I like skype over Teams, it just doesn't make any sense keeping Skype when Teams has exactly the same functionality, even mostly the same look, and more. I do hate still not being able to have one Teams client, on windows, for all my Teams accounts.
FFS, Microsoft pull your head out of your own ass (Score:2)
Teams doesn't work on the vast majority of operating systems, and computer systems. If you assume a very low estimate of Linux / Unix systems running 85% of all computers, which is honestly low, Teams doesn't work on Linux or Unix. Skype is really the only Microsoft-based communication platform that Linux users (and I'm grouping BSD, Solaris, etc Into this term), can use. If you discontinue Skype, then what are users going to do?
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.
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It doesn't matter how many are desktop computers, isolating to desktop computers is a meaningless % because how many desktops make up the computing overall market? 1%, maybe .01%? I honestly don't know. Regardless what I run as an OS, I shouldn't be locked out from using “productivity software”, and Teams certainly qualifies are productivity, it just doesn't work on most systems. As for running the web portal, why? I don't need a poorly built iFrame wrapper, that crashes over 50% of the tim
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> 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?
[1]https://learn.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/teams-client-system-requirements
Re: (Score:2)
Sounds like a rather big business opportunity, costing not too big an investment in money and time.
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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
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> 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.
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I know, the point is I would rather not use a bleeping browser, I want a proper application that works natively with my systems. The point of an application such as Teams, is to stay out of the way until you're needed, be useful for X minutes, then go away and be silent again, completely separated from anything my computer is otherwise doing. What If I close my browser because I'm done for the day? What if I'm doing testing in browser X and I have to keep closing and opening it, with a cache clear in be
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It doesn't work well on Windows 10 for me. Keeps wanting me to switch profiles and then hanging
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Yes, that's a known bug, it does the same thing on Windows 11, and can do the same thing in the browser if you have multiple tenants setup.
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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.
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Honestly, switching to Windows 11 on the desktop, would cost ~70% of my productivity. Between the massive latency, the glitches, the bugs, the crashing, the total instability, it's not usable. I have Windows 11 setup on a T500, and Fedora 41 setup on a different T500, connected to the same computer, Windows operates at ~50% latency factor, so if Fedora did X in 1 second, Windows 11 would take 1.5 seconds. Combine that with the unusable GUI, the sloppy controls, the nonsensical layout, it's not usable.
I
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)
When Teams became a subscription service, I ripped it out of my Ansible config file and deleted it from all my machines. With the Skype announcement this morning, I just did the same thing with Skype. Before the lockdown, recruiters used to specify what video platform the perspective employer would use for the interview. I begrudgingly installed Teams in the beginning but once it required a subscription, I told recruiters I don't do Teams. Turns out that was a great screening technique because Microsoft-he
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?
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.
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It's a also a great idea if you view customers as data monkeys you can spy on for advertising/ai/whatever.
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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.