Two years ago, in 2023, Microsoft announced that over 36 million people were still using Skype daily to communicate via video and chat. The app was 20 years old at that time, and has been in Microsoft’s hands since 2011 when they bought it from eBay for $8.5 billion to replace their own popular (but less capable) Live Messenger service. On May 5, after 14 years in the trenches, Microsoft has shut down the service and has given users 60 days to move their content (contacts and messages) to the free version of Teams, or lose the data forever.
What this means for you
If you were a diehard Skype user hoping that Microsoft wasn’t going to make good on it’s February promise to close Skype permanently on May 5th, you are probably wondering what to do next. Fortunately, it seems that logging into Teams with your Skype credentials will ease the transition by automatically bringing over your chat history and contacts, because, in case you didn’t know, your Skype account was actually a full-blown Microsoft (personal) account all along. Unfortunately for many, the Teams replacement for Skype is not a feature-for-feature substitute, with the main loss being the ability to make phone calls to land lines and mobiles that don’t have internet access. This well-known “life-hack” trick was assuredly what kept Skype popular in face of the various other video chat apps that have come to dominate the space, and probably one of the main reasons Microsoft decided to shut down Skype in the end. If only a fraction of the 36 million Skype users were using Skype to make cheap or free long-distance calls, Microsoft was leaving a large amount of money on the table, even by their standards. Rest in power, Skype. You were a handy bit of software for many people.
