Microsoft is killing Skype
681 comments
·February 28, 2025drooopy
bayindirh
I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before.
It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much.
After it's marred, they didn't try to mend it much, and when it started to work well due to better bandwidth, they didn't push it back again. It fell to the wayside of "value-adds" all Windows software vendors love to put in the bag.
> "Oh you get the whole Office, great. There's some Skype for you, too. You know it doesn't work well, but it won't hurt to have it installed, no?"
So they blew their chances, badly. I personally don't like Microsoft, but they could have made me use it, if it worked well. Now I use Meet, which is again bundled with Google One, but it's web based and works much better. It also supports the nice features (noise cancelling, advanced backgrounds and whatnot) under Firefox, too.
Lammy
> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before.
Story in two headlines:
- “NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution” https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f... (2009)
- “Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?” https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ (2011)
lern_too_spel
Mass surveillance was easier when anyone, including the NSA, could run a supernode. Microsoft had to run its own supernodes because usage changed from most people running Skype on desktops, which could be supernodes, to most people running Skype on phones, which can't. At that point, it hardly makes sense to push new supernode functionality for multiparty video calls and other optimizations to end users to handle a small fraction of calls when updating your own servers is much easier.
WebRTC will happily set up a P2P video call with better encryption than the old Skype had if all you need is a 1-1 call without NAT traversal.
nimish
Naw, having been there, Microsoft killed Skype because it had no idea how to manage a B2C product.
qingcharles
Well, the better ask is why eBay bought it...
wslh
Back then in 2009 we were [1] intercepting Skype calls before the offered plugins.
[1] https://www.nektra.com/main/2009/02/24/directsound-capture-u...
dcminter
Personally I think their big, incomprehensibly stupid manoeuver was the Skype vs Skype for Business (Link) split. Had they merged them into a single client that could speak either protocol and share contact lists the story would have been very different.
Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this? Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?
addicted
Skype for Business, which was really just a rebranding of Microsoft Lync, destroyed the Skype brand.
But it also indirectly damaged both variations.
Skype for Business became less of a “business” software like Lync was. So unlike Lync, which was fairly spartan but information dense, Skype for Business added a ton of white space, colors, icons, etc making it less efficient and less serious than Lync.
At the same time, Skype itself became purely consumer and went way down that route, focusing more on Temu like animation gimmicks than actually being a communication tool for friends and families.
bayindirh
> Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?
I remember somebody saying "Micorosft is an amalgam of different power centers and dynamics. Some people inside genuinely loves open source and wants to be part of that, and some hate it like it's the evil itself. So, there's in-fighting and power struggles in many areas in Microsoft".
I think the comment came after a project manager personally gutted .NET Core's Hot Reload support to give closed source parts a boost, and things got very ugly both inside and outside of Microsoft.
hnlurker22
This is what happens when you hire leet code engineers and they become managers. Look at Google now. This isn't some magical outcome of big corps. A big corp is practically the people who work there.
windex
>Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this?
Management by committees. Lots of office politics. Most senior execs have successfully failed upwards. Once every 18 months they let go of people they stick the blame on thereby losing any memory of design decisions.
decimalenough
Lync was completely unrelated software with a different tech stack that was just branded as Skype.
htrp
> Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?
Yes. rivalry is at it's finest (and fiercest) when you're fighting your peer divisions inside the same company.
tracker1
Microsoft had MANY opportunities for this, Google as well for that matter. Especially if you consider Instant Messenger clients. I absolutely loved Google Hangouts when it was the all in one solution (including GV and SMS integration on the phone). MS(N) Messenger could have been very close as well a couple times.
It's the management decisions to try to dramatically change or replace things that lands with lesser solutions in the end. Because the incentives and bonus structure are mostly screwed up in many of these companies.
Skype could have been the best, be all, end all solution for MS and brought everyone to their knees and just killed them. But it wasn't the first, or last time this would happen.
Cthulhu_
I think it was the other way around, they know about the issues with Skype and built something new, but they knew the power of the Skype brand so they slapped it onto their new product.
DrFalkyn
Sadly this is the culture now at tech companies. All the data has to go through company servers, whether it makes technical sense or not
Pretty sure I flunked a system design question this reason. I was asked to design an online chat system. I asked of they wanted support for groups, they said no. So I gave them simple two way socket solution.
Apparently that wasn’t good enough, They wanted a full DB storing everyone’s conversations, that you could query, etc. I suspected it had nothing to do with any technical considerations. They just wanted that data.
pests
Did they want multi device? How do you sync messages? History?
niutech
There are also Jami and Tox as decentralized Slack alternatives.
tombert
> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before.
Maybe; I think people forget how horrible Skype was on your phone battery when it was still P2P. The P2P-ness of it was definitely pretty cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the decreased battery.
> It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much.
Honestly I've been using Skype to talk to my parents ever since I moved out of my parents place in 2012, and for the last decade or so, it's been perfectly fine. I know it's kind of a meme to hate on it, but it never really was an issue for me.
s1artibartfast
I think they killed it when they migrated user login to a Microsoft accounts that nobody used or wanted.
For me at least, it made Skype with synonymous with trying to figure out the email and doing a password reset
nickdothutton
Easier to monitor if centralised.
bayindirh
Yes, everyone and their Windows installs and their _NSAKEY guessed the reason was that.
tomjen3
Skype was born in a world of laptops and either wireless or otherwise unmetered internet. You can have a P2P system there.
In a world where the primary interface is a mobile phone, you can't just run a piece of software on a mobile phone. If you do that Skype will just be known as the app that completely destroys your battery randomly and for no seeming reason.
mihaaly
I think they killed it by making it unusable through forcing dubious UI/UX/design-principle/other-bs trends for no compelling reason at all on a perfectly good interface.
kaon_
This. In German the word for "video-calling" is "Skyping". Similar to MSN, the strength of the brand and goodwill that it has in some geographies is on-par with Google for search, or Coca Cola for coke. The fact that the software got consistently worse, year on year on year is hard to grasp for me. Microsoft made the right call to cannibalize and use teams. But how was Skype such a pain? Not being able to share screenshots in chat killed it for me.
harvey9
Coke is a trademark owned by Coca-Cola - the generic word is cola. Their brand is so strong that even though you were thinking about the topic of branding they still got you!
jimmydddd
"Yes, in many parts of Europe, people commonly use the word "coke" as a generic term for soda, similar to how it is used in the American South, essentially referring to any type of cola beverage rather than just the Coca-Cola brand; this is because Coca-Cola is so widely recognized across the continent." --Google's ai thing
pests
In the US south if you ask for a coke they will ask which kind - Pepsi, sprite, or a Coke coke? Etc
fh973
In Germany, MS was very successful though to get organizations on Teams during the pandemic. Zoom is not a thing.
Sure, it's nice to brand the verb, but when the product behind it is EOL, why bother.
wkat4242
That's because teams was offered for fee with m365 which most companies used anyway.
Having said that, Zoom is an absolutely terrible product. The backdoor they installed in Macs for example and then when it was brought to light refused to remove it until Apple was forced to blacklist the application. They're either incompetent or evil.
yardie
Zoom was popular with at home schoolkids. Because to use Teams you had to have a Microsoft acccount first. Zoom was a link, a meeting ID, and password. Sometimes just a link.
tetris11
Jitsi and BBB were pretty popular across universities at the time, back when the German government were pivoting hard into Element/Matrix:
ianbooker
Zoom is a thing in Germany.
randerson
Skype should be a textbook case of how a product team will keep inventing new projects to justify their continued employment, even if it means messing with a winning formula.
Skype achieved perfection a year or two after the Microsoft acquisition. At that point they should have downsized the team and focused on maintenance. Instead, they kept releasing new versions, each new version being worse than the previous one.
ryandrake
Wasn't the whole point of O.G. Skype that it was entirely peer to peer, and did not require a central service? Then, once Microsoft bought it, the first thing they did was ditch that and make it require centralized servers? IMO peak Skype was right before it was bought. Agreed though, every time Microsoft touched it, they made it worse. But many (most?) software is like that now. I dread new releases, because everyone makes software worse now.
johannes1234321
The p2p part was relevant for the operators as Skype didn't need to run (and pay) their own servers to deal with the load, but some other user close by provided it for free, giving low latency all over the world.
However with shift to mobile the patterns changed and less people ran it on desktops, thus less supernodes and the p2p approach had limitations (no group call) where solutions were needed.
codedokode
The selling point of original Skype was that it allowed making audio calls on worst connections, requiring just several kilobytes/sec, and going through NATs (other products required a direct fast connection and were usable only within a local network). As for P2P, I don't think users care about that. Not having P2P is actually better because P2P can disclose your IP address.
For example, Tox is a fully decentralized P2P messenger and it is not widely popular.
randerson
Skype pre-acquisition had constant sync issues. I'd sometimes send a message that would only show up days later, or someone would call me and it would only ring on a different device. P2P was obviously cheaper for them to run, but it became far more stable after they introduced servers.
genewitch
msmsgs.exe was p2p. Came with Windows 98, possibly 95. Video, audio, text.
Maybe microsoft forgot they made that?
x0x0
Right, but that architecture falls apart in a mobile-first world.
novia
Skype was perfect BEFORE the Microsoft acquisition. Everything afterwards was unnecessary. Source: I used Skype before and after 2011.
alternatex
Group calls weren't perfect. P2P doesn't lend itself well to group calls.
darkhorse222
That's how I feel about Reddit. They just keeping adding things nobody wants because otherwise how do they justify their salaries and their stock price?
OvbiousError
Almost everything I do for work uses teams, so I can't say MS missed any boats. It's spectacular how pervasive teams is given how universally reviled it is. I'd personally switch back to slack in a heartbeat for instance.
l33tman
Don't know about Slack's videoconf, but Slack's cheap insistence that we pay a rip-off amount of money per month for storing some TEXT messages more than 90 days has continuously degraded my appreciation for it over the last years to the level of me hating it now.
They're so cheap. Just put a quota on total storage or something, that actually map to their costs..
We have a Slack for a shared office of 10 people or so, we use it to like ask each other for where to go for lunch or general stuff, it must cost them $0.001/month to host, but you continuously get a banner that says PAY TO UNLOCK THESE EXCITING OLD MESSAGES all over it, and when you check what they want, they want some exorbitant amount like $10/month/user so $100/month for a lunch-synchronization tool. For $100/month I can store like 5 TB on S3, that's a lot of texts.
I'm genuinely curious why they don't have some other payment option, I'd be happy to pay $1/month/user for some basic level if they just don't want freeloaders there. Well, I wouldn't be happy.. but still :)
OskarS
Slack is primarily a business tool, and for a business tool $10/user/month is extremely reasonable for the value (perceived or real) it brings. The company has to make money, and you do that by charging for your products and services, and that price is not exorbitant.
crummy
This frustrates me too. Discord stores your messages forever for free! They're slowly eating Slack's lunch when it comes to internet communities... but I guess Slack doesn't really care; those communities were never going to pay any real money anyway.
bayindirh
Slack is part of Salesforce now. Do I need to say anything else?
null
el_snark
You may like to look at a self-hosted mattermost then.
knowitnone
you're getting services for free and you call them cheap?
soundnote
Yeah, I just checked to reply to another commenter, and Slack's just expensive:
Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user
Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo
M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo
delecti
At my job we use Teams, but basically just for meetings (and the associated chat), and it works really well. About the only complaint I could make is that it occasionally guesses the wrong audio devices, but it's fairly easy to change them.
I didn't understand all the hate until a few groups tried pushing the actual "teams" inside "Teams", and goddamn they are bad. They're an awkward and confusing mashup of chat rooms and forums, with conversations spread across different levels and constructs that each receive different levels of UI focus.
stackskipton
That's because "Teams" inside Teams are not part of Teams, it's tied to Sharepoint/Exchange and thus poorly integrated.
UltraSane
At a company I worked at someone saved some important data in Teams and left the company and I was tasked with trying to export it but it turns out it would have taken significant time scripting the API to extract all the data. They said forget it and just left it in the Teams and made sure not to delete her account.
datadrivenangel
Yeah teams for actual phone calls is good, often with better noise cancelling and reliability than zoom these days.
But the mess of sharepoint/o365 opened in wrappers inside of teams for the teams and it's just a hot mess that makes me angry when the UI is so different.
StableAlkyne
Some suit was probably worried about cannibalizing their Teams business (even though Skype has better name recognition and Teams has a bad reputation).
It's pretty common in the dinosaurs like Microsoft. Kodak for example had working digital cameras very early on, but didn't do anything with them because they didn't want to cannibalize their film business.
Give a suit a KPI, and they're gonna optimize for that KPI.
rchaud
Kodak doesn't make lenses or camera hardware, so it's possible they didn't pursue digital cameras because they'd be immediately out-competed by Sony, Canon and Nikon.
TylerE
Remember, Teams was originally "Skype for Business".
GrzegorzWidla
Originally it was Office Communicator, then Lync, then Skype for Business and now Teams.
kevin_thibedeau
Digital cameras were mostly useless in the 80s and early 90s for rank and file consumers. The demand wasn't there.
FuriouslyAdrift
Teams (which includes the guts of Lync... aka Skype For Business) has grown into Microsoft's behemoth (320 million active daily users while Zoom only has 200k business customers and actually declined YoY).
If you are talking non-business free users then sure, Zoom comes out on top.
booleandilemma
Doesn't Microsoft install it on every windows laptop automatically? Are they all "users"?
tokioyoyo
Active daily users. Any company with Office suite (which is basically any behemoth in every single country) just uses Teams, instead of paying up for Slack.
lxgr
Skype (the original product/service, before Microsoft's corporate hug of death) was an amazing piece of technology.
It was pre-cloud in every aspect, not only using P2P for actual VoIP traffic but also for contact list management and node discovery (via DHT and promoting random people's PCs to act as core nodes! Opening up Wireshark on my laptop when on fast university Wi-Fi with a public, unfirewalled IP was quite the experience).
It was also available literally everywhere: Linux, the Sony PSP, Nokia's Linux-based "internet appliance/tablet" series, Symbian smartphones, cordless landline phones in some countries...
I've long since moved on, but I do have some very fond memories of it being a lifeline to friends and family when backpacking and studying abroad in a time of horrendously expensive international/roaming calls.
Rest in peace!
kvakerok
Pre Microsoft Skype was malware-grade good. I still remember sysadmins imploding in impotent rage as it near effortlessly evaded their firewalling attempts.
echelon
2000's era P2P was wickedly good.
P2P was such an interesting part of internet history. It's a shame client-server prevailed over it.
Decentralized systems are so much more liberating. It felt like being a part of something rather than being a serf in someone's platform.
1970-01-01
>2000's era P2P was wickedly good.
I think it's only the WWW that went from wickedly good to sour and evil. The P2P world is just as good as it used to be, just not as force-fed and loud as the unhinged hellscape that is Web 2.0. If you look, you will probably find whatever you're looking for with just a DHT link.
qalmakka
I think that NAT is a major reason why P2P and self hosting failed to take off in any significant way. I think that the internet would have been a wildly different place were IPv6 widespread in the early '00s.
fuzztester
Jini may be an example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jini
I remember Bill Venners used to write about it on his site artima.com .
notpushkin
> It was also available literally everywhere
I remember trying to run SkypeKit on my Kindle. Didn’t get it to make calls, but I think it received chat messages!
timewizard
> before Microsoft's corporate hug of death
Abuse of the law to buy a competitor, form a monopoly, and then price fix an entire market. It sounds cute when you say "hug of death" almost like they didn't intentionally seek out this precise outcome.
> It was also available literally everywhere
Funny how that was literally the first thing to get the axe. I guess some "hugs" are like that, huh?
> Rest in peace!
Justice for Skype!
SideQuark
Skype was founded 2003, wholly bought by eBay in 2005. MS bought it from eBay in 2011, when Skype had 30m users, which was and is tiny compared to relevant markets for videoconferencing. Even now Teams has around 30% of the market. In the 14 years since the purchase MS increased Skype usage significantly and brought the tech to a vastly bigger audience.
So no, there was never a monopoly, the market share was vastly too low to “price fix an entire market,” and “the hug of death” certainly doesn’t mean making a product better and more used and only shuttering it after 14 years when it’s been vastly outclassed (Skype usage sits at around 1%, and Zoom completely slaughtered it). Most tech fails much quicker.
Liquix
but m$ doesn't have a monopoly on video/instant chat? teams is so objectively bad that anyone who was using skype will move on to a different company's product
threePointFive
I wish that were true. Every enterprise I've seen has thrown their hands up and said "we already use microsoft for everything else (generally email, ad, or office) and teams is bundled why would we use anything else". So instead of getting good chat and VoIP apps, the decision makers just stick with the cheapest option (Teams, they're already paying for it in one of their tens of other Microsoft subscriptions)
timewizard
That they failed to successfully profit from their crime does not obviate it from being criminal. Skype was created in 2003, I do hope it's appreciated how much smaller the market was back then, on top of how bandwidth constrained it was.
On Hacker News of all places what I think gets lost in the monopoly conversation is that it's not just the consumer market you need to pay attention it's the _labor_ market. I always assumed that would more be more readily apparent here. I am often surprised to find out it is not.
avhception
In a personal setting? You may be right.
In a corporate setting? "We already have Microsoft accounts for all of our users, do you want us to maintain a separate user list? No way. Teams may be bad, but it's not bad enough to warrant that."
mynameisash
> teams is so objectively bad
What is better than Teams? I don't love Teams, but it's light years beyond what Zoom provides, and the services that Amazon and Google offer were pretty garbage last time I checked.
giancarlostoro
Smart phones killed Skypes rich P2P. Then Microsoft added permanent nodes too little too late. The synching was awful on mobile too. The app would lock up waiting to download every single chatlog going back years. Just download the last ten and quietly download the rest in a separate thread.
Microsoft was not fast moving enough to keep Skype at its prime.
Timpy
Back in the Windows 7 days I installed Skype on my parents computer before moving abroad, their user experience was basically like receiving a phone call. Even though they weren't tech savvy we never had any issues. I would call them, and if they were home and near the computer, they could answer it and we'd be video chatting.
A year or so ago I found this to be impossible, there was no application for desktop that was as simple as receiving a phone call. My father has no smart phone. I sent him a zoom link via email but he couldn't log on to the family computer without getting blasted with UI updates, terms of service changes, "Do you want to use OneDrive?", "Here's what's new in Chrome", "Try asking Copilot anything!", etc. From his perspective the computer never worked the same way twice. I wish we had regulations that prevented buying out competition.
falcor84
On a related note, a bit over a decade ago I had installed logmein on my parents' computer to be able to easily help them with any IT issues. But they since pivoted away from personal accounts and I never found anything else as straightforward. I feel that in a lot of ways tech has regressed.
EDIT: I just found that logmein actually offer a personal product again, named GoToMyPC, but what used to be entirely free at the time, is now priced at $35/month.
Lammy
> I just found that logmein actually offer a personal product again, named GoToMyPC
I 'member this being advertized on TechTV back in The Day. It's interesting to see the focus on PDAs now that the product category is entirely dead: https://web.archive.org/web/20031209031959/http://www.techtv...
…but didn't realize it's quite as old as it is (1998) and had never heard of “ExpertCity”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoToMyPC
jacobgkau
> It's interesting to see the focus on PDAs now that the product category is entirely dead:
In the context of screen sharing, I guess smartphones are the evolution of what they meant by "Pocket PC". Sure, the mobile remote desktop use-case is a little niche, but the product class isn't dead, it was just reinvented.
homebrewer
Try RustDesk instead of a bunch of proprietary alternatives suggested by other posters. It uses H.264/H.265/VP9 depending on your hardware and network, and is very fast. It also lets you set up your own server, leaking no information to third parties, but that's optional.
frereubu
I know this is about Windows, but just in case any Mac users don't know, there's a default app called Screen Sharing (in Applications > Utilities) that lets you dial into any other Mac user's computer if you have their iCloud username, allowing you to both see and control their screen. It doesn't work 100% of the time - sometimes it requires a tweak on a wifi router on the other end - but it's saved me countless hours on unproductive phone calls while helping my mother with tech issues on her iMac.
imperfect_blue
Windows actually has a built-in remote assistance tool now called Quick Assist. It provides a simple way to remotely control another Windows machine with user consent, without requiring third-party software. It's preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11—just launch 'Quick Assist' from the Start menu, generate a session code, and connect. While it's not as feature-rich as a full remote desktop solution, it's more than enough for parental IT support.
Flameancer
It hasn’t regressed really, it’s just no longer free. Microsoft quick assist exist and allows you to connect to any pc with the users client code.
mastax
If you have a decent connection I find just using Windows Remote Desktop (RDP) over VPN (Tailscale) works really well.
The value prop for the proprietary services like TeamViewer for me is they work much better over poor connections and cross platform. (Are there any decent RDP servers for Mac/Linux? In any case it’s another thing to have to install.)
ccozan
Windows has a built in app for remote servicing called QuickAssist. Works perfect, no need to install anything.
tracker1
I think Chrome Remote Desktop works pretty well. It's easy enough to configure for use and put a link to the host page in the browser toolbar. I might setup RustDesk if I get the time, it was in a state of flux last time I looked at it, but it seems to be more solid now.
PeterStuer
Starting with Windows 10 this functionality was bundled with the OS
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/solve-pc-problem...
hbn
Do they not want to use a smartphone?
FaceTime is about as seamless an experience as you can get, and it's basically like receiving a phone call because it's indeed a call on a phone!
grrowl
My grandparents were terrible at smartphones. To them, it's like a landline phone, but you have to charge it every 1-2 days. Yet my grandpa was decent at PC, and email, and so on, as it was in "a place" and easy to drive.
mihaaly
Exactly! This is a trend nowadays. Go to web - they even make apps for it, just to put you to that webpage - then do some or all of [1].
Unusable!
About Skype: Once upon a time I had a phonecall with my then almost 70 retired mother from abroad, who never been a tech-savvy person, to be gentle, saying we should try Skype for its video chat, better sound and its no/low cost. I will install it next time being home. Next day she called me on Skype! She used the link I sent (she is not speaking English btw.), installed, configured, looked me up and called me out of the blue. Did not happen similar before or ever since. Soon, I will have trouble getting through the typical user experience, well, more like not giving an f getting through it.
[1] https://img.ifunny.co/images/5e047ed0fb02df4c206c9d836ed21c8...
And in [1] they missed the "Try closing the 'Disable ad-blocker plugin' pop-up"
homebrewer
Telegram does that and also has a native (as in C++/Qt) desktop client, unlike almost every other messenger.
lxgr
WhatsApp these days also has native clients for Windows and macOS (UWP and Catalyst, respectively). They don't yet have all the features of the Electron/web client, but are getting there, and at least on macOS, I much prefer the experience.
Also, I wouldn't exactly call Qt native, unless you happen to be on KDE.
bdavbdav
I think this is definitely get them an iPad and use FaceTime territory. They seem to be the least invasive in terms of just letting you get on with the task in hand, instead of having to understand what a OneUI update is and what each of the 5 different TOS checklist items means.
null
legitster
Skype is the epitome of technical debt. Millions of lines of code for a service that isn't technically difficult to provide anymore. When I was at Microsoft, I was told working on Skype was about as popular as being sent to a gulag.
The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.
hn_throwaway_99
This Joel on Software blog post is now 25 years old, https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-..., but when it first came out it was widely viewed as gospel.
I'm generally a big fan of Joel Spolsky, but in retrospect, I think this advice is just wrong, and I think Skype is a perfect counterpoint. That is, sometimes a rewrite is a horrible idea, but at the same time sometimes not doing a rewrite is a horrible idea. If making changes to the code becomes such a nightmare that your rate of progress is much less than your competitors, you're going to lose.
While there is still some good advice in that blog post, hard-and-fast rules are rarely correct. Most things in engineering are tradeoffs, and it's tough to know sometimes what the right balance is.
jbreckmckye
Sometimes the technology "background" changes so much that the codebase you have just becomes irrelevant.
We live in a world with WebRTC, embedded agents and digital telephony. The platforms, OSes, infrastructure are so different from how they were in 2009. Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more?
What I don't get is how MS couldn't use the Teams stack to power Skype as a consumer brand. Probably there was some effort but something got in the way. It might even have been a cultural barrier - Skype was an acquisition, and acquired codebases generally fossilise
esafak
So the answer can change over time. You have to periodically re-assess the benefits of a rewrite.
niutech
> Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more?
Yes, if it is less bloated than Electron-based. See Jami, which is a native app and it's distributed and open source.
codedokode
Skype probably was rewritten multiple times - C++ client was replaced with Electron, and server API was broken many times as well. The reason Microsoft shuts down Skype is not because there is too much technical debt but because there are few paying customers and because there are new messengers like Telegram.
pentagrama
The 2.0 version of Skype is Microsoft Teams, and they built it from scratch.
Along with the Skype code, the Skype brand was also thrown in the trash. You could question that decision—perhaps keeping both brands for different target demographics would have been a better move. Teams could be for work and business, while Skype (powered by Teams' code) could remain for regular consumers. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s better to strengthen a single brand rather than maintain two separate products.
That said, I do have an issue with the name Teams—it doesn’t quite fit the use case of calling your grandma overseas.
legitster
Teams also has a lot of technical debt in it's own given that they essentially combined Yammer with Sharepoint and Office to make it!
hn_throwaway_99
Thanks, that's a good point that makes the most sense to me - MS didn't rewrite it because they essentially didn't need to, they already had something else.
Totally agree about the brand fumble. I think Teams is the least known/used brand by consumers, but honestly maybe these days that really doesn't matter that much from a money-making perspective.
hulitu
> and they built it from scratch.
They are still building on it. For some reason, noone at Microsoft has any idea how the final product shall look like, so they are changing the UI/UX every couple of months.
soundnote
Yeah, the consumer side Teams app is already different in UX than the corporate one. Wouldn't have been terribly difficult to brand that as Skype and market it as such.
jrcplus
I worked at Skype from eBay to Microsoft. The clients were rewritten, sometimes from scratch, sometimes redesigned to chase after the latest UI trend. But rewriting clients didn't address the fact that the OG widely successful Skype was fundamentally peer-to-peer. There were no servers, only supernodes.
After smartphones took off, management was reluctant to ditch P2P and move to a client-server model, for both business (running servers costs money, and remember Skype mostly made money on calling PSTN) and technical reasons (P2P was at the heart of Skype). Internally, engineers had Skype working "in the cloud", but it took years of waffling (middle management was distracted by the introduction of Scrum; don't get me started about that; upper management was distracted by the company getting bought and sold twice) before slowly turning around the big ship.
By then, the A/V part of the tech had become commoditized, and plenty of free alternatives (namely FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat) had appeared on the scene, with better business models. No amount of rewriting code and building from scratch addressed that latter part. Management was very interested in finding new ways of making money, but it was also (for better or worse) very reluctant and careful in introducing ads into the UI.
niutech
Why not open source Skype then?
pif
> I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.
I'm surprised that you are surprised!
Rewriting a million-lines-of-code project from scratch without the stupid bits is easy. Getting the equivalent of the working bits, instead...
Joel expressed this concept quite well already 25 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
hn_throwaway_99
Funnily enough, I put that blog post in a sibling comment and described why I think it's bad advice. Why don't you think Skype is a perfect counterpoint to Joel's argument? I mean, Skype basically died because they didn't throw it away and start from scratch. Like the parent comment said, competitors came up, and what used to be a million line giant project was about a bajillion times easier when WhatsApp came along.
Yes, it's absolutely true getting the working bits correct is hard, by consigning yourself to a slow death doesn't seem like much of an improvement.
paulddraper
Skype is 20 years old.
Tech has advanced enormously in that time.
Someone
“Skype for Business” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business) sort-of was that. It put the “Skype” brand on “Lync”, which was a rebranded “Office Communicator” (IIRC, there were some technical changes along the line, too, but I may misremember that)
It got replaced by Teams.
legitster
And Skype had to maintain compatibility with many of these services that came and went.
TiredOfLife
They did launch a from scratch electron crap at least once. That version didn't migrate settings/account. Had to help at least 3 different people who suddenly lost access to their contacts.
lxgr
Launching a Skype 2.0 incompatible with 1.0 clients/users would be a quick way to completely ruin said brand value.
Of course, as we see here, not doing anything had the same effect in the end...
theyknowitsxmas
Sell the brand to Signal
dkyc
It's valid to think of this as Microsoft sort of squandering a unique opportunity to become the ubiquitous video conferencing standard by not investing in Skype, back when it had a market-leading position. Another way to look at this is that even though they bungled this, they still managed to become that solution through Teams. Even though they failed to compete with Skype, got leapfrogged by Slack, and then again by Zoom, they still manage to come out on top, at least in corporate America.
You can argue that they could have been Zoom, too, but looking at Zoom's 22bn market capitalization I don't think Microsoft sheds many tears about that thought. It's more a testament to the incredible market power and distribution muscle Microsoft has, that they can afford this many bad decisions and still win in a way.
orev
The way Microsoft “won” with Teams was through monopolistic bundling it into Windows and Office. To this day most people don’t like using Teams for chat, but because it’s there by default there’s not a good reason to go through the hassle of bringing on another product.
basisword
>> To this day most people don’t like using Teams for chat
People will say the same thing about Slack, email, and any other messaging system they are forced to use. People love to complain, especially if they're coming to a product after using a different one at a previous job.
remir
I don't know anyone who prefer Teams over Slack.
dumbledoren
And that will last until the regulators start cracking down on that monopoly like they started cracking down on Google...
strunz
They gained it back by basically giving Teams away for free and getting companies to say "we're already paying for this bundle, so let's stop paying for Zoom/Slack." They still missed out on billions which they'll try to claim back over years of slow price raises (until the competition lowers prices and/or becomes more competitive).
AnonC
Tangential: I have a U.S. Skype Number (i.e., a real phone number offered by the Skype service) that's mainly used to receive and make (occasional) calls from/to a bank and to receive SMS occasionally. The cost is about $40 a year. With Skype Number not available for purchase since December and the Skype platform (including Skype Number) going away soon, what are some simple, good (and preferably cheaper) alternatives for a VoIP service that works on an iPhone? I do not have any (other) real phone number in the U.S. I guess my current Skype Number cannot be ported or moved to another service.
Are there any alternatives to get a real U.S. phone number that will work in another country for long periods (AFAIK, many providers require the phone to connect to a local cellular network periodically)?
Edit: In case it wasn't apparent, I'm not physically in the U.S.
kolp
Try voip.ms. Incoming texts can be sent to you as an email. A US number costs about $1.50 a month.
hyperdimension
Seconding VoIP.ms - they're great. Calls are billed at about 1c/min depending on if they call you (DID) or you call them.
supertrope
I use Groundwire as the client for voice and SMS.
physicles
Does this work for Claude? I have a Google voice number, and Claude rejects it.
freetime2
I was using Google Voice for a while, which is nice because it is free and never had any issues receiving SMS. A US phone number is required to activate, so I used a US relative's phone number to activate and then just disabled all the forwarding features so calls and SMS would never be forwarded to that number.
Unfortunately, I went so long without actually using it that they took my number away (my fault because they did send me a warning but I just forgot about it). Now I'm in the same boat as you as I had switched to a Skype Number after that.
But Google Voice is a decent free option to consider if there's someone in the US who could help you with initial activation. Until Google finally decides to kill it, at least. I'm frankly surprised that Microsoft killed Skype before Google killed Voice.
chneu
I've been using Gvoice pretty much since it started. I'm just as surprised as you that Google hasnt killed it. The writing has seemed to be on the wall a few times but it's still around, thankfully.
When they semi-killed hangouts a couple years ago I thought for sure Gvoice was gone.
dustincoates
I've used Google Voice as my primary number since 2010, and started using it before Google even owned it (i.e., when it was Grandcentral).
Development seems to have (relatively) picked up recently. There was a period of about five years when I don't think there were any publicly announced developments. Now we'll get maybe one a year or so.
xnx
Google Voice is weird. It seemed like they should've killed it, but they just added a few minor features this week.
bsimpson
I've used Google Voice as my primary number since 2010.
It mostly works flawlessly. It's cool that you can use wifi calling when abroad and the POTS network domestically, all transparently from the POV of the person calling you.
I have noticed that some services (Square, Venmo, and Ticketmaster come to mind) don't like sending 2FA texts to VoIP numbers. I end up needing to use whatever SIM I have at the time or a relative's number for those, and I'm low key anxious I'll be locked out of my account someday.
AnonC
GP here: I had the exact same experience with Google Voice (linked to my Skype Number several years ago). Sadly, I could never get it to work with another Skype Number again.
samsk
Try zadarma.com I've multiple numbers there
jraph
It seems what you are looking for is a SIP provider. There are many. Some of them allow interconnection with the "real" phone network.
rwmj
If only SIP wasn't such a trashfire of non-interoperating impossible to configure garbage.
csomar
I have the same problem and I want something as straightforward and un-scammy looking as Skype. And no, I don't want to configure some SIP client or some stuff like that.
jim180
I use tello.com. You can get eSIM and activate it while you are outside the U.S. If you won't activate roaming, sms and calling will use wifi calling.
SXX
Tello costs at least $5 / month though. Skype was jusy pay as you go.
csomar
I pay $6.5/month for the number. It is pay as you go for calling but you have to pay for the number.
dzhiurgis
Do you know how providers detect your country when using wifi calling? Mine says it's only valid while you are within the country, wonder if VPN would work around it.
jim180
No idea, but Tello always worked outside of the U.S - Lithuania in my case.
I guess, provider will always consider your country where the phone number is located. Funny thing, while I'm roaming, my IP address will always be Lithuanian. It does not matter where the world I'm currently staying.
onlygoose
They can detect your country by IP address. Also AFAIR your cellphone sends CellID and/or location with every wifi calling connection attempt.
zie
jmp.chat should, though I have no direct experience with it outside the US for long periods of time, I can't seem them caring.
jszymborski
VoIP.ms
dijit
End of an era, but the writing was on the wall.
I have fond memories of using skype to contact my friends and family circa-2011 when I was working for Nokia in Finland.
Ironically, microsoft killed nokia the same way microsoft killed skype, an acquisition and then strangulation.
if nothing else, it’s at least two times the european tech sector was actively harmed by US tech giants… which isn’t much, but weird that it happened twice.
tonyhart7
"microsoft killed nokia"
nokia did that to themselves, microsoft aquisition just prolonged its inevitable ends
KingOfCoders
Loved my yellow Lumia 920. I thought the panels and scrolling start screen was much better (concurrently used Android and iOS at that time).
Just like with Zune, it was not part of MS strategy and therefor dropped. You need to keep working on something like this for years to make it successful. Large companies though drop products that are not a huge success after two years, associated with such products is a career killer.
[Edit] I got the Lumia to decide as a CTO at that time if we would go into Windows phones or not. I asked for more Lumias and XBox (to show cross plattform eCommerce) from MS to evangelize inside the company, but was let hung dry. So we did not support Windows phones. They never went full in.
robertlagrant
If I remember correctly, the CEO at the time Steve Ballmer said they were betting the farm on mobile and ARM-based tablet computing. They went very hard on mobile until SatNad came along and killed it.
(Former Touch Diamond user here.)
tonyhart7
absolutely the fact they just give out on hardware side eg:nokia,surface device,zune,vr headset etc is just disappointing
I think this is about company culture as a whole too, MS only know how to make software
this is same problem with google too, with pixel device is very underwhelming success given how many resource they have
out_of_protocol
That was the funny story - Nokia got it's latest CEO (Stephen Elop) from M$, successfully almost-destroyed company, got it acquired by M$ and hopped back to M$. So, probably, it was the plan all along
tonyhart7
why do you think this is happen in the first place???
the Board and Shareholder knew that it was sinking ships so it want cashout to Microsoft at least before its going to rubble
skrebbel
Sure, though if you strangle a junkie about to OD, you still strangled them.
victorbjorklund
Not true. Nokia was already dying. Microsoft made a bad attempt to save Nokia when the heart had already stopped.
pembrook
Same for Skype.
Yes, most acquirers bungle the acquisition (regardless of nationality), but the reason these companies decide to sell in the first place is because their future prospects on their own don’t look great.
Skype was a consumer success but consumers violently hate paying for software (just read HN).
The market for video calls-as-a-business is entirely B2B. Skype with their fun whimsical branding and non-sales dominant culture couldn’t hack it. Plus, big dumb enterprises hate screening new vendors, so Microsoft/Cisco/etc were always going to win that space.
Zoom basically swooped in later able to take all the learnings from Skype and go B2B from the start.
eloisant
Microsoft planted Stephen Elop to make sure they kill all their effort at a modern mobile OS so they end up using Windows Phone.
null
hbn
That was almost the Dr Doofenshmirtz "if I had a nickel" quote
klohto
> actively harmed by US tech giants
Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
caseyy
I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated. There was a vibe of “things are going to change around here, no more free rides, the grown-ups have arrived.” Awful management decisions were made, most of the talent left, and the team from the original company now only exists on paper.
n=1 and all, but I've heard similar stories. European tech companies have very different cultures and ways of making money, shaped by our laws and consumer expectations.
Skype, for example, was used as a pay phone and a simple messaging app before Microsoft bought it. You put in a euro, and you call and message your friends. It mutated into a bloated Microsoft Live app with several different front-ends, including some integrations with Office and various subscription services that sold the same thing in multiple ways. Core features stopped working, too. I'm sure someone liked the Frankenstein monster that it became (I don't kink-shame sadists), but most of the original users, and especially Europeans, did not.
If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype except for taking out a competitor, I'd say the decline would have been the result of managerial incompetence and American managers' lack of understanding of Europe. But of course, once a competitor bought Skype, there was no reason for it to exist anymore, so perhaps that is the reason it died.
Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
xnorswap
I too have worked for a European company bought out by a large American company.
They too didn't understand our culture. They completely ignored the parts of our business that were scalable and taking off, and focused instead on nebulous "synergies". They actually seemed more interested in us taking on their branding than what we actually did. They'd push down demands to chase some latest trends but when we needed something back from them they struggled to give us the time of day.
They also immediately tried to give pay cuts and force immediate redundancies and seemed shocked to discover they couldn't legally do that. So instead they had to polite request that people in our company take a pay cut. I only know of one person naive enough to take them up on that offer.
I left a few years post acquisition, it was clear things would not get better we were just left rudderless because we'd previously been run by the founder for ~25 years and now were run by no-one with no direction.
skeletal88
Anecdote about MS and Skype.
Knew a developer who worked there.
Day 1 of aquisition - there were 4 layers of managers between him and Steve Ballmer.
A year later there were 8. Tjis is how much bureaucracy and managers MS added in only one year
mschuster91
> I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated.
Yup, that's also my experience. Americans are just like the unofficial President - they don't take "no" for an answer when they demand something, no matter what, unless you manage to get court judgements because that actually threatens the bottom line.
> Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
I always remember when Wal-Mart tried to come to Germany... and had to leave with its tail tucked in because they just couldn't cope with stuff being done differently here [1].
[1] https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-...
hulitu
> If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype.
Yes, it was used as a backdoor to scrap user data when the computer was not in use. That's why i uninstalled it.
sl-1
Nope, Nokia was killed via suicide-by-microsoft-exec. They took in a MS aligned CEO and promptly proceeded to destroy their own chance of competing (using Maemo/meego or android for their phones) by using MS operating system.
I guess one could call it leadership stagnation, but I would argue more it being just plain old stupidity
ahoka
Microsoft did not buy or kill Nokia though.
jajko
> Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
What? None of those were EU government owned, all was private. Do people really have this sort of (completely incorrect) view on how things work in Europe? Not even donald was ever stating such ridiculous things
wqaatwt
Who said they were government owned though?
Stagnation and risk averseness is pretty much the default when it comes to most major European companies. In almost any sector.
riffraff
Skype got me through my first few years living in a different country from my family/friends/girlfriend/enployer.
There was a time when whole companies were on Skype the way they're now on Slack.
It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged it.
disillusioned
We were one of those companies. I remember that you had to alter the order of users added to a group in order to have multiple groups (the equivalent of "channels") with the same member list. We'd use that trick to essentially have per-project channels. It wasn't necessarily super graceful, but it mostly worked.
When we made the jump to Slack in early 2014, we migrated as much of our Skype history as we could, which was _a project_, but again, mostly worked.
moomin
I’m loving this: it’s a complete misfeature that anyone can point out is conceptually just wrong, but also implemented so incompetently there’s a workaround.
sky2224
> It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged it.
It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged a lot of products. It genuinely makes me think they're aware of it at this point.
tonyhart7
"Microsoft mismanaged it."
they don't even manage it, like they just let it "stay" that way
I think this is the problem with Trillion dollar company, they don't want focus on "small money" problem and they can just buy tech/company if they find it important enough in the future
null
john_the_writer
Yep.. in almost every way it should have beat out slack. It did everything better, and had a name. It was so very close, but lost. Mostly I think because of how hard it was to get non-users into it's eco system.
tonyhart7
wdym non user?? it integrate nicely with windows eg:for sometimes skype installed by default on windows
gloxkiqcza
Skype for Business UX > MS Teams UX
kleiba
Teams is a heavyweight behemoth with awful UX while Skype orginally had a very lightweight feel to it. Of course, Microsoft had to kill that through various UI "improvements".
Also, Skype has an official Linux client.
Instead of developing Teams (NIH at its best), they could have carefully developed Skype into a similar platform. But I'm not sure a giant like Microsoft is capable of something like this. But at least their 8.5bn investment wouldn't have been just to kill a competitor.
moltopoco
The award for the most absurd "UI improvement" must go to the Skype iPhone app that was painstakingly rewritten so that it felt like a Windows Phone app, complete with gestures that didn't make sense to iOS users: https://www.neowin.net/news/skype-for-ios-completely-redesig...
It was actually technically impressive, just...why??
recursivecaveat
It's a funny kind of myopia that causes companies to generate 'consistency' in ways that only make sense internally rather from customers' perspectives. 100% of Skype on IOS users interact with other IOS apps, vs some considerably smaller amount use Skype on Windows Phone or even Windows Desktop. When the conventions disagree the choice should be obvious...
high_na_euv
>NIH at its best
How do you know?
Teams feel totally different from Skype, from design perspective
bombcar
Teams is just Skype for Business which was just rebranded Lync.
They never were at all related to Skype which was based around p2p phone calls, not group chats or businesses.
rchaud
the design is a re-skin of Skype for Business. The app is way more bloated now, so there is an additional pane of options for things like team-only chats, task tracking etc
tombert
Damn, this is the primary way I talk to my parents and my grandmother.
Genuine question, what do people here recommend as a replacement for non-technical people? I'll need to walk my grandmother through the process of setting something remotely.
No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out, and I'd need something that can run on a computer. I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.
randerson
WhatsApp works well for most people and runs on any device.
I gifted a MacBook, iPhone and Apple Watch to my elderly father, and I now use FaceTime. He came from a PC and is not technical, but he adapted fairly easily. (The fall detection feature on the watch gives us both some peace of mind.)
geocar
> No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out,
So FaceTime lets you make a link that you can give to someone with a web browser and they can use it to reach you, and it works pretty well. You might just try it.
> I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.
That's probably the biggest limitation: It's a webpage for calling you (the person with the iPhone), not a page for you to call them. If you want them to open a app/page when they are available, I think Messenger is best in terms of features and usability.
If your parents/grandmother aren't already on WhatsApp I don't think you should link their phone number (which might be linked to their banking etc) with a public chat system because there are a _lot_ of online scams targeting the elderly through WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and linking to the mobile number associated with other (higher value) services. It is very easy to lock-down Messenger so nobody who isn't already a friend can't target them.
tombert
I was looking into it, and it looks like there's a free version of Teams. I think that might be the easiest to get them to onboard to simply I suspect it'll be easier to talk them into something with the "Microsoft" branding.
I hadn't really thought about scams. I'll keep that in mind.
paulddraper
FaceTime requires the initiator have a Mac.
Mac users can call others. Others cannot call Mac.
geocar
Exactly wrong in every way. FaceTime requires the Mac or iPhone or iPad user create a link. It's a regular (persistent but revokable) link to a web page with javascript and shit, but anyone can click the link which initiates the call; Others can call Mac, it's Mac which can't call others.
tombert
Yeah, and I don't have a Mac computer anymore, and neither do my parents or my grandmother.
I coordinated with my parents, we're gonna try the free Teams thing.
areyourllySorry
signal also allows you to turn off discovery by phone number.
aaomidi
I gave my grandmother an old iPad I had. It’s been amazing.
She’s also in Iran, so it’s one of the only services that somehow the govt doesn’t target when killing video call apps.
jjice
Google Duo (might be lumped in with Meet now) worked well for me when I was on Android and everyone around be was iOS. It's cross platform and worked out of the box.
Discord probably has a bit more going on since it also has a community focus, but it may be worth looking into since it's a platform that won't be going away anytime soon. It also works from the browser if having them download something is a headache.
paulddraper
If your grandmother happens to have a Google account already, Google Hangouts. [1]
Wouldn't need to set up anything. And works as reliably as anything I've seen.
EDIT: Signal is a very HN recommendation for drop dead simplicity. Syncing keys?
tombert
Actually I just realized my grandmother doesn't have a smartphone of any kind, so I think Signal is out regardless.
I might see if I can just migrate her to the free Teams service from MS. It hurts me a little as an annoying Linux guy but I think this would be the easiest option.
renata
I mean, Signal works as TOFU if you're not sharing state secrets or anything.
blakeashleyjr
I would make the jump to Signal. It's super easy and secure. Has all the features you'd need (minus the online status). It's how I communicate with my whole family.
tombert
I use Signal, and I've gotten my parents to use it for texting as well, but I don't think that they have used Signal desktop.
That's likely what we'll end up using since I've already onboarded my mom and my dad on this.
vinni2
My parents and grandparents are non techies and don’t have a lot of experience but they can make whatsapp calls easily. It takes bit of getting used to though.
sumitgt
Why not just use something like Google Meet? You send a link and the other person just needs a browser.
It's a pain to deal with syncing issues on Signal Desktop.
caseyy
When Microsoft acquired Skype (the company), it was clear they would kill it. Skype had previously been bought by eBay, for which it served the purpose of entering a new market. Then, it was bought by some investment funds, for which it served the purpose of making money. However, to Microsoft, which already had its Windows/Live messenger (which copied Skype’s homework anyway), Skype served no purpose except to remove a competitor. They did not have a reason to develop it.
I’m surprised, in some ways, that it took almost 15 years for it to die. If Microsoft absorbed the Skype tech in 1 year and rebranded/reskinned Live Messenger to look like Skype, they could have been done with it in 2012.
Now, they are retiring Live Messenger and Skype. Two technologies have become zero. It is interesting that they chose to go this way.
wsc981
I am not even sure if Microsoft was interested in the technology. I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network. I believe Microsoft replaced this way of working shortly after acquiring Skype. Perhaps on behalf of security agencies.
grishka
> I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network.
It did! It was some impressively cool tech too. At the time, at least in my country, some ISPs would disable your internet access when you didn't pay, but the LAN between subscribers still worked. So obviously nothing worked, except Skype. My theory then was that it would find a path to route around the disconnection by having the Skype client of a different subscriber on the same LAN, that did have internet access, relay your traffic to the rest of the network.
machomaster
This approach to technology has serious problems. I would send a message to someone and turned off my computer, thinking that the message would be sent whenever the recipient was online. However, that was not the case. The message only arrived when we were online at the same time. Therefore, Skype is completely useless as a tool for asynchronous communication, for the main type of messaging!
mrweasel
I seem to recall that Skype had the concept of "super nodes" which could facilitate NAT traversal for of users which didn't have a direct internet connection. Microsoft got rid of that pretty fast and replaced it with Microsoft managed servers (which to be fair seems less sketchy that using random users machines as something akin to a STUN server).
caseyy
Perhaps. I would more readily believe that if Microsoft didn't have an established pattern of killing competitor companies and tech.
I think they really tried to merge Skype with Live Messenger, stripping Skype for parts. And maybe those parts weren't the tech as much as the brand, but we don't know how much tech they adopted.
basisword
Live Messenger (previously MSN Messenger) was another massive fumble by Microsoft. It was absolutely essential as a teenager in the 00's and people spent insane amounts of time on it. If MS put out a 'dumb' phone with Live Messenger they might have stood a chance when smart phones came around.
caseyy
They had an iOS app that surprisingly few people knew existed.
https://www.macstories.net/iphone/microsoft-releases-windows...
vel0city
I had a few dumb phones that IIRC supported MSN messenger pre-iPhone. They also often supported AIM and even sometimes Yahoo messenger.
Agraillo
We take the modern internet speeds for granted, at that time the tech behind Skype was top notch and probably when Skype made its way into Windows, that looked like the original destination. But later many questionable decisions made things worse even before the internet became faster and other voice technologies were up to the task. One of them was changing the protocol that made many headsets bricked. Probably from the marketing point of view it was a "if one wants Skype, he or she would buy Windows" step, but obviously it was not
nneonneo
I put $10 on an account over ten years ago to make sporadic calls (e.g. customer service in other countries). That account still has $5 left, and I’ve made a ton of calls to many different countries.
What’s a good alternative here? I just want to make outgoing international calls cheaply.
Marsymars
Nearly same situation here. I recently used it to for travel logistics for a trip to Japan for some local things that didn't have online booking.
From a bit of Googling, Viber may be a reasonable alternative. They're owned by a reasonably non-shady/non-fly-by-night operation (Rakuten), have a desktop app, and let you buy credit without a subscription: https://account.viber.com/en/rates-index
Happy to hear about experiences with alternatives.
nneonneo
Seems reasonable. Rates are more expensive than Skype (almost 2x for some of the destinations I probably want to use), but not catastrophically so. I’ll chuck a tenner in and see how it goes :). Fingers crossed that can last me another decade.
apatheticonion
I'm in the same boat, I wonder if you can use the web interface from a 4g modem to make calls/send&recieve SMS messages. Could install a cloudflare tunnel on it and access it while abroad.
I know you can do sms messages, but I'm not sure about calls.
Perhaps an old Android phone could be used for this?
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
I use MobileVOIP, but voice quality and the probability of a call to connect is inferior to Skype.
dzhiurgis
30-50 cents per minute is very expensive.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK
Checked prices, Skype is more expensive.
rwmj
Especially an alternative that doesn't mean giving money to Google or using any Meta service.
pm3003
SIP providers. I used Ippi before 2015, but then EU regulations made it illegal to bill more for EU calls than for domestic calls, so I had almost no more use for it.
The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic to maintain or even expand their lead in video conferencing, while allowing a complete unknown (outside of the corporate world, at least) like Zoom to become the dominant platform, should be studied in business schools.
The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling that, based on personal experience, it is still used in place of FaceTime and other services, especially by older people.