The org I work at marked the final days with a send-off that really tried to capture the spirit of what it meant to so many of us. The nostalgia, the weird emoticons, the dial tone - all of it. I'm not going to miss Skype, but I will miss the idea of it.
RIP Skype
41–50 of 87 posts
Re: RIP Skype
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What about discord?
What about it? Nobody is going to buy it for billions of dollars, as has happened to Skype.
You can still do surveillance capitalism - its just not as valuable as it used to be ..
Re: RIP Skype
#43Early 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…
It's funny how eBay still did better stewardship of Skype than Microsoft.
Re: RIP Skype
#44What are people replacing Skype with, for calls to international phones (cell, landline)?
That’s the only thing we used it for (calling relatives who for reasons, are unable to get an iPad and use FaceTime like normal people). We’ve been struggling to find a reasonable replacement that doesn’t look sketchy. It also doesn’t need to be free, we used a Skype subscription so we are ok to pay a reasonable fee.
Viber and Rebtel have come up in my searches but I would love more opinions/options.
Re: RIP Skype
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about discord?
What about it? Nobody is going to buy it for billions of dollars, as has happened to Skype. You can still do surveillance capitalism - its just not as valuable as it used to be ..
What are you talking about? Technology is as widespread as ever and chances to use AI for more effective surveillance and manipulation are through the roof.
Re: RIP Skype
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve never met anyone who chose to use Teams. My organization forces me to use it. I don’t like it, but to its credit, it is better than “Skype for business.” It’s strange to me how companies take these huge messaging brands and then just burn them down (Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google’s chatbominations, even AIM). As a user, they don’t fizzle out due to user disinterest, it’s always the owner just sort…
The issue is that they have working tools which work in one period, but fail to adapt to change. AIM, Yahoo, MSN etc. were mostly plain text systems, built around presence and a single client. Then came mobile phones, with unreliable connections, with messengers which allowed integrating pictures etc. and easy sign up (iMessage by using apple ID, which every iPhone user has; Whatsapp by using phone number which direc…
At any point of its existence and until its last hour, Skype was a better video call/chat product than Teams.
Re: RIP Skype
#47I sometimes use Skype in a web browser on Linux. Will this migration to Teams work in that as well?
The instructions in the article say "Download Teams on your device" so that makes it sound like no...
Re: RIP Skype
#48What are people replacing Skype with, for calls to international phones (cell, landline)? That’s the only thing we used it for (calling relatives who for reasons, are unable to get an iPad and use FaceTime like normal people). We’ve been struggling to find a reasonable replacement that doesn’t look sketchy. It also doesn’t need to be free, we used a Skype subscription so we are ok to pay a reasonable fee. Viber and R…
This seems like a very niche use case in 2025 as all the other options over the internet are flat rate and significantly cheaper.
The couple times in the past 10 years I have had to to interact with an international business over an actual phone number, I used Google Voice.
Re: RIP Skype
#49RIP my 50 Euros that they didn't want to re-imburse.
"Just use Teams, your money will be there" ... hmmm, no thanks.
Re: RIP Skype
#50What are people replacing Skype with, for calls to international phones (cell, landline)? That’s the only thing we used it for (calling relatives who for reasons, are unable to get an iPad and use FaceTime like normal people). We’ve been struggling to find a reasonable replacement that doesn’t look sketchy. It also doesn’t need to be free, we used a Skype subscription so we are ok to pay a reasonable fee. Viber and R…
This seems like a very niche use case in 2025 as all the other options over the internet are flat rate and significantly cheaper. The couple times in the past 10 years I have had to to interact with an international business over an actual phone number, I used Google Voice.
Yes, some people like me still need to do it this way. That’s the literal definition of niche :)
(Google voice is not available where I live)