Image: © Photocreo Bednarek/Stock.adobe.com
As Skype faces a shutdown in a few months, Microsoft’s Jeff Teper said that the tech giant is ‘honoured to have been a part of the journey’.
Skype, one of the oldest online voice and video calling platforms, is being shut down on 5 May after more than two decades in service.
The platform, which exchanged hands a few times, was acquired by Microsoft in 2011 for $8.5bn – its largest acquisition at the time. The purchase highlighted that the service not only held strong value for its 170m user base at the time of the acquisition, but that it signalled a future for more advanced internet-based video conferencing products.
At the time of its purchase, Microsoft’s then-CEO Steve Ballmer said that Skype was a “phenomenal service” loved by millions. “Together, we will create the future of real-time communications so people can easily stay connected to family, friends, clients and colleagues anywhere in the world,” he said.
After its acquisition, Skype became its own business division within Microsoft, providing support for the tech giant’s other services, including Outlook, Xbox Live and Messenger.
Skype was the first foray into video conferencing for many worldwide, gaining millions of users since its launch in the early noughties. However, in the years since, innovations in the space introduced several competing services, including Microsoft’s own Teams, Zoom, Apple’s FaceTime and Google Meet among others, all of which led to Skype slowly losing steam.
“We’ve learned a lot from Skype over the years that we’ve put into Teams as we’ve evolved Teams over the last seven to eight years,” Jeff Teper, the president of Microsoft collaborative apps and platforms, told CNBC.
“But we felt like now is the time [to shut down Skype] because we can be simpler for the market, for our customer base, and we can deliver more innovation faster just by being focused on Teams.”
Skype’s user base has been dwindling for years now. As of 2023, the platform had just 36m daily active users, down from 40m in 2020. In comparison, Microsoft Teams, which launched in 2017, had 300m daily users by 2023.
Announcing the platform’s shutdown last week, Teper said that Skype users will be able to sign into the free version of Microsoft Teams using their Skype credentials, as well as migrate their data over to the platform.
“Skype has been an integral part of shaping modern communications and supporting countless meaningful moments,” Teper said, adding that the Microsoft is “honoured to have been part of the journey”.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for the company told The New York Times that no Microsoft employee will be laid off as part of Skype’s closing.
Skype was founded in Estonia in 2003 in by Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, and in 2005, the service was purchased by eBay for $2.6bn.
However, the investment didn’t perform as well as expected, eBay said, leading to the company taking a $1.4bn write-down of Skype in 2007. Eventually, the company divested 70pc of its share from Skype in 2009, selling it to Silver Lake, a private equity firm. A few years later, it was purchased by its final owner, Microsoft.
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