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RIP Skype

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Re: RIP Skype

#61

Post by dagaci »

varjag wrote: post #43
colmmacc wrote: post #14

Early 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.

Some error corrections: ebay bought skype in 2005 for 2.6B (1 million concurrent user), and Microsoft bought them in 2011 for 8.5B (22 million concurrent users) with 74 million concurrent users reported in 2013 falling to apparently 30 million now...

https://www.statista.com/chart/1417/skype-usage/

What is your criteria for stewardship ?

Re: RIP Skype

#62

Post by jgalt212 »

colmmacc wrote: post #51
aa-jv wrote: post #19

Earlier 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.

At its height Skype made its money in surprising ways. There was a margin on Skype credits, which paid for calls into the regular phone system. But there was much more money in brand licensing. Time was you could buy not just "Skype certified" headsets, cameras, but even non-telephony gear like USB thumb drives. SanDisk carried those for years and I presume they out-sold the alternatives enough to be worth the licens…

> But the brand had a lot of trust.

Not for me. I always regarded it as one giant security hole in an era when Windows was riddled with them.

Re: RIP Skype

#64

Post by OliveMate »

I'll always be amazed at how Skype went from being top dog in 2010 to not even being considered a choice in 2020. How did Microsoft drop the ball so hard that when the Pandemic rolled around everyone decided to use the then-unheard of Zoom instead?

Taking a general public lens here. For vidya, Teamspeak/Mumble provided better quality & latency but Skype remained king for its ease of ad-hoc calls until Discord blew it out of the water.

Re: RIP Skype

#65

Post by varjag »

dagaci wrote: post #61
varjag wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny how eBay still did better stewardship of Skype than Microsoft.

Some error corrections: ebay bought skype in 2005 for 2.6B (1 million concurrent user), and Microsoft bought them in 2011 for 8.5B (22 million concurrent users) with 74 million concurrent users reported in 2013 falling to apparently 30 million now... https://www.statista.com/chart/1417/skype-usage/ What is your criteria for stewardship ?

Microsoft had essentially left it for dead shortly after the acquisition. There were multiple assassination attempts from Lyncs-become-Skype-for-Business-become-Teams department and I can only assume noone to fend for the foster child.

Skype under Microsoft had only seen sidelining and feature & platform regress, while it was a thriving product during eBay ownership. It may not be obvious from the bar graphs but it was apparent when one used the product.

Re: RIP Skype

#66

Post by cranberryturkey »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #10
cranberryturkey wrote: post #2

I interviewed at skype after paypal acquired them and then spun them off again. It was a cool p2p app, then microsoft took it over and made it centralized.

Its funny in a way, all that money, but because the paradigm of the organization has to be enforced into the tech, those fingers can not hold this chalice.

when i interviewed there, the VP of Engineer told me skype used to be a bittorrent client, but then they pivoted, hired a ton of video compression engineers and create Skype. video calling using the same p2p technology as bittorrent

Re: RIP Skype

#67

Post by lxgr »

billpg wrote: post #38

Who do y'all use for a dialable USA phone number these days? (I'm in England.) I have (had) a +1-423 Skype number to receive calls (twice a month or so) that took messages that I could play in the Skype web-app.

Google Voice is amazing, but requires a US phone number to set up.

Re: RIP Skype

#68

Post by lxgr »

What a sad ending for both a once amazing pioneer of P2P technology and a great brand and product. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.

Re: RIP Skype

#69

Post by another_kel »

OliveMate wrote: post #64

I'll always be amazed at how Skype went from being top dog in 2010 to not even being considered a choice in 2020. How did Microsoft drop the ball so hard that when the Pandemic rolled around everyone decided to use the then-unheard of Zoom instead? Taking a general public lens here. For vidya, Teamspeak/Mumble provided better quality & latency but Skype remained king for its ease of ad-hoc calls until Discord blew it…

Skype was built on p2p for 2000s internet. It was great technology at the time, but completely wrong choice for 2010s with smartphones and huge chat groups.

If we went back in time the only way to truly save skype would be to basically make discord and gradually replace skype with it, keeping the userbase. This would be way harder than just making discord because migration is harder that writing from scratch and getting that migration approved in a corporate setting is insanely hard.

Re: RIP Skype

#70

Post by billpg »

lxgr wrote: post #67
billpg wrote: post #38

Who do y'all use for a dialable USA phone number these days? (I'm in England.) I have (had) a +1-423 Skype number to receive calls (twice a month or so) that took messages that I could play in the Skype web-app.

Google Voice is amazing, but requires a US phone number to set up.

I wonder if an American friend could set it up for me. My gmail mailbox but their US phone number. (Thanks for the recommendation!)
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