Skype could’ve become WhatsApp, Zoom, or Discord. In 2010 it was in the prime position to win any of those segments.
RIP Skype
11–20 of 87 posts
Re: RIP Skype
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It was a cool p2p app Indeed, I shall certainly miss the low-grade flood of spammers and scammers who slid into my DMs over the decades I wasn't using my Skype profile for anything at all.
Definitely a Skype problem, spamming definitely wouldn't happen on any other service.
you're joking right?
Re: RIP Skype
#13Re: RIP Skype
#14Early one morning in August 2007 I was asleep in my apartment in Leiden and I got a call from my boss Dirk-Willem van Gulik to tell me that 1) Skype was having a global outage, 2) we had to help anyway we could, 3) scope, budget, people, nothing would get in our way.
At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas. We built 3 networks, in 3 countries, in a matter of hours to host Skype super nodes. Apparently Skype had gotten into a retry storm due to a cascading failure because too many peer to peer super nodes had been taken offline at the same time. I think that Tuesday was Windows update day and maybe that was the straw that broke the camel's back. The small list of hard-coded super-super-nodes couldn't cope with the deluge. It took 3 days to get everything back and running, and for me it was the start of a fun collaboration with the team at Skype and eBay who were always nice.
Skype had sold to eBay for 2.6B in 2005. I don't think much diligence was done, and it didn't work out as a great integration for eBay. Then Skype was spun out and sold to Private Equity in 2009. The internet tells me that 65% was sold for 1.9B but I think there was some kind of write-down involved too. And then Microsoft bought Skype for 8.5B in 2009.
So you can have multi-day world-headline outages, be from and based in the EU, and still have 3 unicorn scale exits! There's a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient you can make a business with a great product and good leaders.
Re: RIP Skype
#15Had a clean reliable digital to PSTN service, DID (Skype number) setup and reasonable pricing, now gone. Windows screenshare made it better than Facetime for that usecase also.
To think that the buggy Teams monstrosity/failing Slack wannabe is their take on "evolving" p2p chat, but I guess worse is better.
Re: RIP Skype
#16Skype could’ve become WhatsApp, Zoom, or Discord. In 2010 it was in the prime position to win any of those segments.
It was the "whatsapp" around 2010: everyone had an account on it, was using it's name as a word, ... and it was working really well at a time when it wasn't so common to use video chat, smartphones, ...
The story only repeats again though, like MSN messenger almost a decode before. Which one will be next?
Re: RIP Skype
#17I haven't given Skype a thought in years. I wish I could say the same for Teams, that thing that administrators seem to love and users seem to hate.
I guess the reason you see MS Teams everywhere is because it is bundled for free with all those MS365 packages that are bought for Excel anyway. And for free it certainly is good enough. Group policies and integration into the MS365 admin backend is just icing on the cake.
Re: RIP Skype
#18It's honestly amazing Skype lasted as long as it did at Microsoft.
Re: RIP Skype
#19Early one morning in August 2007 I was asleep in my apartment in Leiden and I got a call from my boss Dirk-Willem van Gulik to tell me that 1) Skype was having a global outage, 2) we had to help anyway we could, 3) scope, budget, people, nothing would get in our way. At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas. We built 3 networks, in 3 countries, in a matter of…
Skype was an intelligence-gathering platform with very few equals. In the era that Skype was producing unicorn horns, surveillance capitalism was on a rocket ride.
I doubt those same conditions would allow for multiple unicorn horns in the modern era. You can't build a Skype-like surveillance network now; that horse has left the barn.
Re: RIP Skype
#20Let's hope Teams is next in line
Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience?
More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?