Was old enough to drink. Pour one out.
They said they were going to do it, and they did. Skype is now a dead program.
The 22-year-old internet call program has ridden into the sunset. It is no more, it has ceased to be, its expired and gone to meet its maker, bereft of life it rests in peace.
Once upon a time, it was the single biggest voice chat application. And it was in everything; you could find integration on Xbox and PlayStation consoles, on your phone, everywhere.
It passed through several hands over its nearly quarter-century lifetime. It first was bought by, of all things, eBay, then the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (yes, really), before finally being bought by Microsoft. And we know how that story ended.
But Skype wasn’t meant to hold the throne for long. I mean, come on, it had Myspace integration at some point. As the march of time passed, so too did its relevancy; almost all of the things that once integrated Skype soon gained their own, baked-in voice chat programs. Microsoft did not help this: they preferred to add more and more feature bloat to a program whose value had mostly been simplicity. Granted, they’d kill these features just as fast, but the fact they thought it was necessary in the first place is the problem.
The rise of Dicksword Discord in the mid-2010’s fundamentally bumped Skype from relevance. Why people preferred Discord is beyond me; I personally hate the way everything works in the program. That said, they’re in the middle of destroying themselves for investor money, so I’ll probably be writing one of these for it soon enough.
So, now, you caon no longer download Skype. Well, at least commercially. Skype for Business is still available, though that’s a version meant specifically for workplaces. Microsoft has said “Skype for Business users are separate from Skype Consumer and remain unaffected by this change.”
Almost all of users’ Skype data is being migrated to Microsoft Teams; that includes chats and contacts. If that doesn’t set your world on fire, you can also export your Skype data for personal use. Though what that may be is frankly beyond me.
Shame. I still prefer its usability over Discord.
Source: PC Gamer
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