Skype had everything to master the video calls. Now Microsoft has just put a death date

It has been Xda Developers who advanced the news that Microsoft has just confirmed publicly: Skype is going to be closed forever. It will happen in May, when they put the final brush to a story that could be very different and that will now be an inherited inherited by Teams, the company’s right eye for communications.

It seemed a long time since Skype’s end was imminent. It was released in 2003 and Bought by Microsoft in 2011 for 8,500 million dollarsfigure that then seemed astronomical.

Skype was a before and after. He turned the calls and long -distance video calls into something accessible to anyone with the Internet. It became the metonymy of video calls (“Do we make a skype?”), Something that very few products achieve.

But Skype’s story is rather that of a wasted opportunity. He had everything to become a dominant platform:

• He arrived very soon to the market.
• He had a great adoption.
• He had a recognizable brand worldwide.
• And I had behind Microsoft’s resources.

However, bad decisions and a lack of constant innovation allowed rivals such as Facetime, Zoom, Google Meet, Discord or WhatsApp a toast.

Seen in retrospect, Skype’s decline was not sudden, but gradual.

• In 2015 It was integrated in Windows 10but the experience was unnatural.
• For a long time, Microsoft maintained a strange duality between Skype and Skype for Business. The latter was replaced by Teams in 2019.

Meanwhile, others advanced quickly. Zoom catapulted during the confinements of 2020 thanks to the juncture, but also thanks to simplify: he eliminated records of records and downloads. Facetime was completely integrated into the Apple ecosystem. And WhatsApp took advantage of its omnipresence and popularity to offer them as one more service.

And meanwhile, Skype was stagnant in a cycle of redesign who never solved his main problems (Sometimes they magnified them): An inconsistent interface, performance problems and a confused user experience.

Microsoft is not only killing Skype, it is redirecting its users towards Teamsincreasingly popular. Skype users can use their credentials to access Teams and there they will see their contacts and conversations. During the transition period, users of both platforms can communicate with each other. Then there will only be space for Teams.

A bittersweet end. A closure that seems almost merciful. Skype lived in his own confusing identity. It remained as that application that we had installed “just in case” and that we do not remember the last time we used it despite the fact that at the time it played a fundamental role.

Being able to see and talk to other people in other countries was revolutionary in the 2000s, Skype leaves A great cultural impact that is now transformed into archeology. As a final gift, a lesson leaves us: it does not matter if a platform is very established, it can become irrelevant if it does not evolve to the compass of the needs of its users.

End of an era.

Outstanding image | Xataka with Grok 3

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