Skype is going the way of Clippy, Netscape and Vine. After more than two decades, Skype is going away.
Microsoft announced on Friday that it will be shuttering the online calling program on May 5, telling users to use Teams instead.
Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype in 2011, Bloomberg reported.
CNBC said Skype rose in popularity when people didn’t want to pay for calls, but when cell phones dominated, it took a backseat that even the COVID-19 and the pandemic-forced embracing of video conferencing, did not get the resurgence that could have come with the pandemic lockdown but was rather eclipsed by Zoom, Slack and other platforms.
In 2016, Skype had 300 million monthly users but only 36 million in 2023, Bloomberg said.
Still, Microsoft said it used Skype to help develop Teams into what it is now.
“We’ve learned a lot from Skype over the years that we’ve put into Teams as we’ve evolved teams over the last seven to eight years,” Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative apps and platforms, told CNBC. “But we felt like now is the time because we can be simpler for the market, for our customer base, and we can deliver more innovation faster just by being focused on Teams.”
Skype logins, chats and contacts will port over to Teams over the next few days, the company said in a blog post. The data can also be exported.
Skype monthly subscriptions will end and those with credit can use it in Teams.
Microsoft will now be focusing on new features for Teams, such as adding artificial intelligence tools to the platform, Bloomberg reported.
This is not the first part of Skype that has gone by the wayside.
Microsoft phased out Skype for Business in 2021, about four years after announcing it would be shut down, Tech Crunch reported. Teams replaced it with what Tech Crunch called the “app of choice on Windows 11.”
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