Goodnight, Skype

And that wraps up the Skype journey. May 5th, 2025 will be the last time you’ll be able to use Skype.

If you don’t know what Skype is, or was, let this be a great example of the technology lifecycle. It is a reminder that despite hype about any current technology (and company associated with it) it always comes and goes.

Skype started in 2003 and it allowed people to do free long distance calls. Back then, it was a big deal. Hard to imagine that there were times where it was costly to place a call to people living in another country or even in another city. These days, many providers sell plans with unlimited calls within continents?—?North America, Europe are good examples of how much things have changed since. But suddenly, there was a company which allowed people using just their computer to call another person for free. The only condition was that both people had to use the same software and have an Internet connection. Calling and texting was free.

To appreciate the impact of this technology, consider this: 40% of international calls conducted in 2014, an estimated 214 billion minutes, were made through Skype. I know it is 2025 and today even a billion dollars doesn’t raise eyebrows, but 214 billion minutes is about 407,154 years.

I am sure you can see how the telcos around the world felt about this.

How did Skype make money? It created a bridge between its network and the local phone companies where people could call people from their Skype account on their landlines or mobile phones. And you could receive calls in your Skype client using the SkypeIn?—?local online number.

In 2005, Skype was bought by eBay for $2.5 billion. The idea was to integrate the communication into a seamless experience and to help to conduct even more/better/faster transactions between the sellers and buyers on the eBay platform. It also allowed eBay to reach millions of people to advertise its services and products.

In 2011, Microsoft bought Skype and this time the price tag was $8.5 billion. Microsoft, as always, tried to buy its way into the market. (As a side note: Microsoft was desperate to get on the communication bandwagon. Skype was only part of the effort. In 2014, Microsoft bought Nokia and the plan was to have a version of Windows running on it. You know, like iPhone or Android, but bigger, because it was making inroads with its Exchange server email offering. And you know how that ended. Not well for Nokia.

Since Microsoft saw Skype as the future, it started killing its other products?—?the Windows Life Messenger and later the Lync offering. If you don’t recognize any of these product names, it either means that you are too young to know or desperately trying to forget the past.

To its credit, Microsoft put in enough resources and made the Skype client available on many devices or operating systems. It even built clients for iOS (Apple) and its arch nemesis Linux.

Skype technology was definitely well established and deeply integrated. For your own curiosity, you can review the list of Skype features.

Life was good.

The same year Microsoft bought Skype, another company was born. A company which is now known by a name which it adopted in 2012?—?Zoom.

Zoom was founded by former employees of Cisco?—?the networking giant. These people worked on a business communication tool, Webex, and thought that there wasn’t enough software to use to communicate. How crazy must you be to start a business when the market is saturated with software and controlled by the who’s who of the tech world?

Most people were not fond of being stuck in their homes a few years ago, when COVID-19 came on the scene. But if anybody is fond of COVID-19, it would be Zoom. With few other options to socialize face-to-face (but not in person), Zoom went from obscurity to the top in less than a year. In 2020, it was the 5th most downloaded app and it helped to keep going the world forward during the pandemic. Video conference call with a click of a button.

But this post is not about Zoom. It is about Skype and the fond memories of free long distance calls. This is the technology’s recurrent pattern. It comes and goes, it helps us at the moment and then somebody comes with something better and more helpful; and the old one slowly disappears.

On May 5th, 2025 we will say goodnight to Skype, it was nice workin’ with you. You helped people to communicate better.