Microsoft is retired Skype in May, encouraging people to adopt teams

Skype is starting.

Friday, Microsoft announced that the 21-year-old call service and messages will close on May 5. The software company is encouraging Skype users to migrate to its free team app.

Skype gained attention in the 2000s to give people a way to chat without paying the phone company, but stumbled upon the mobile era and did not enjoy a great resurrection during the pandemic. Some people have forgotten that it is still available, given many other options to chat and call.

“We have learned a lot from Skype over the years we have introduced teams as we have evolved teams over the last seven to eight years,” said Jeff Epper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative applications and platforms, in an interview with CNBC. “But we feel like now is the time because we can be simpler for the market, for our customer base, and we can offer more innovation faster just by focusing on teams.”

Over the next few days, Microsoft will begin to allow people to enroll in teams with Skype credentials, and Skype’s contacts and conversations will be transferred, according to a blog post. People can also export their data to Skype. The company will stop the sale of monthly Skype reconciliation, and users with credit can continue to use them in teams.

“This is definitely a great moment, great for us, and we are certainly very grateful in many ways,” he said. “Skype pioneer audio and video calling online for many people, many people.”

One of the most sustainable digital brands.

In 2003, Janus Fris and Niklas Zennström, who previously co-founded the file separation program from Kaza colleagues, began Skype in Estonia with help from a group of former classmates with zero telecommunications experience. Initially, Skype was a tool for people to call each other for free internet. The strange name stood for “Sky Peer to Peer”, a reference to the basic voice of service on the Internet protocol, or VOIP, architecture.

Skype was caught quickly. By 2004, there were 11 million registered users. from ebay announced a plan to buy Skype Technologies for $ 2.6 billion in 2005, user counting had reached 54 million, and Skype was anticipating $ 60 million, thanks to payments from those who wanted to call cell phones and fixed lines.

Meg Whitman, the Director General of Ebay at the time, predicted that Skype would help people quickly finish products of products, especially costly ones, linking buyers and sellers. And eBay could load extra for such calls. Skype users around the world can detect eBay and PaypalAlso. The deal was completed 29 days later.

Under eBay, Skype user number increased, exceeding 405 million by 2008 and income from communications increased. But then Whitman withdrew like CEO, making way to the former Bain John Donahoe executive, who did not think Ebay’s essential businesses were taking advantage of Skype transaction.

In 2009, the economy was in recession, EBAY sales growth had become negative, and the stock price was lower than it had been since 2001. In a statement requiring the issuance of a Skype app for Apple The iPhone, Donahoe announced that eBay will launch a public offer of Skype as part of a split.

But ebay never filed for an IPO Skype. Four and a half months after stating the IPO strategy, Ebay said he had reached a deal to sell Skype to a group of investors led by Lake Silver in a $ 2.75 billion agreement. The online auction operator received a 30% share in the Skype buyer. According to the investor group, Skype presented an IPO, but that didn’t happen. Microsoft grew up taking Skype in 2011 by $ 8.5 billion, with eBay receiving over $ 2 billion.

“Microsoft and Skype together will merge hundreds of millions or, as Tony said, billions of customers and empower them to communicate in new and interesting ways,” Microsoft’s CEO said at the time, Steve Ballmer, in a press conference, referring to the comments earlier by Skype leader, Tony Bates. To that point, 170 million people were using Skype every month. Ballmer intended to integrate Skype with several Microsoft products, including Lync, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Phone and Xbox Video Game Consoles. Microsoft also took Skype by running on her Azure Cloud infrastructure.

Skype failed to collect a billion active users, though.

Apple Local Issage and FaceTime were receiving withdrawals on iOS devices. In 2014, Facebook Buy WhatsApp, a mobile messaging app and months later, users gained the ability to set calls beyond borders. WhatsApp got up globally. So did Wechat I Tencent.

Skype, meanwhile, implemented numerous redesign and faced criticism by fans. In 2016, Microsoft introduced teams as a “conversation -based work space” for organizations with office productivity software that would compete with Slack, which was then a developing start.

When Covid came and pushed people to work and study from home, EnlargeInitially conceived for business use, it became a customer favorite for video calling. People can also be connected to video through services from CiscoFacebook and Google. Skype without a use of use, but Microsoft placed large engineering resources behind teams for companies, government and schools, and the investment was paid. Analysts began to focus on the number of team users that Microsoft would detect, with the figure exceeding 320 million in 2023.

As for Skype, Microsoft’s current CEO, Satya Nadella, has not mentioned it in a revenue call since 2017.

In 2023, Microsoft said Skype had 36 million active daily users. This was reduced by 40 million in March 2020. He refused to talk about how many people used the service today, but said the number of minutes that consumers have spent in teams increased fourfold in the last two years.

“I think a good writing of the story of the item would mark the relocation on the mobile and the Cloud as a significant change in the communication category,” said.

Look: What happened to Skype?