Microsoft’s shutting down Skype in favour of Teams

Skype will be no more from May, as Microsoft tries to shift the Skype user base  over to Teams instead.

Microsoft owns a wide range of software products and services it didn’t in fact develop in-house, but, rather like Google, it too has software and services that from time to time it simply stops supporting.

The three fans of Microsoft BOB who gather annually* can attest to that, I’m sure.

The latest service in the firing line is Skype... and honestly, for a lot of people the news that Microsoft is going to shutter Skype in May would probably be met with thoughts along the lines of “Skype? That was still a thing?” or similar.

But no, Skype apparently still does have some users — possibly as many as 36 million users daily according to Microsoft a few years back — though they don’t have long to transition over to other platforms before the servers go offline.

Microsoft of course would prefer users switched to the consumer-level versions of Teams — or even better for its bottom line, the enterprise variants that cost more.

I suspect the reality is that a decent chunk of them have probably shifted over to FaceTime, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and the many, many other competitors that essentially ate Skype’s lunch wholesale.

Still, I’ll be a little sad to see Skype though, even though it’s been a few years since I used it in any kind of regular sense — typically to talk to overseas family members because it was considerably cheaper than any kind of international call at the time.

Skype wasn’t quite the first VoIP service I ever used — technically that was for a magazine feature where we used one of the earliest services to call a Las Vegas hotel from Sydney to inquire about room rates as a test — but it was easily the one that nearly everyone gravitated to for a period as the “best” service.

Skype of course also had an interesting history as a product; birthed in Estonia (I very nearly went there once for a Skype conference), sold to eBay for billions, then (eventually) on-sold to Microsoft for even more billions… and in a couple of months, it’ll just be a footnote in Internet history.

*I’m making this bit up. Three whole fans of Microsoft BOB? Doesn’t seem likely.