Bye Skype
Microsoft is killing Skype in May 2025. I haven't used it for a few years, but I'm going to shed a tear or two.
It's hard to overestimate how important Skype was a little over 20 years ago. I had recently moved to San Francisco and made a lot of phone calls to friends and family back in the UK. There was this thing called a landline, and as well as local service you had to choose a long distance provider with all sorts of complicated tariffs and fees. Cell phones were their own nightmare and even for SMS you paid per text message. Incomprehensibly, ring tones were on their way to being a multi-billion dollar business. My current phone has been on vibrate for its entire life and I travel the world with free high speed Internet included in my plan. Skype marked the beginning of this transition using P2P to open VoIP and video calls to the masses. I even had a cordless phone that made local calls over the phone line but seamlessly switched to Skype for long distance.
Skype's P2P stack could be used for more than phone calls. I built a business to backup your computer over Skype. It's one of the best things I've ever worked on. The Internet was slow for most people. and so you could do a local backup on LAN and then send incrementals P2P via Skype whenever your computer was idle. We also did superior local backups with full history, encryption and locked file support when most competitors choked on PST files. Skype were kind enough to include us as a premium extra in the client. We did some paid search and PR, but the lion's share of our customer acquisition came from this placement.
My current job involves many Teams calls, but before that we operated on hundreds of Skype channels. Before that work was driven by email and conference calls. I'm ambivalent about this shift. Email has some advantages, and hours of video conferences are way more draining than the voice bridge alternative. Teams brilliantly combines channels and chats that look very similar but work completely differently adding an entirely new mental load to the workday. Skype used to display a special cat emoji if you held down three keys at once. I know which philosophy I prefer.
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(Published to the Fediverse as: Bye Skype #etc #skype #microsoft Memories of Skype, including building a backup business on it, that mysterious cat emoji, and a landline with Skype built in. We'll miss you! )
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