Way back before everybody was suddenly stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic and using Zoom to work and socialize, there was a predominant video conferencing app that nobody used much outside of work. It was Microsoft’s Skype.
Before we use Zoom as a verb in the way we Google or Uber, in that way that signals complete dominance of a technology sector, we’d say “Let’s Skype about that boring business thing.”
After Microsoft kills Skype on May 5, nobody will ever (have to) say that again. After five years of diminished relevance, thanks to the trifecta of Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams, Skype will be as extinct as Radio Shack and dodo.
once, skype was everywhere
As a young journalist pinging people all over the globe for interviews, I’d have to pester people in all sorts of time zones in which people wouldn’t want to spend their precious few cellular minutes talking to me (I don’t blame them).
But with an internet connection at an internet café (another relic of the era), my sources could eke out a chat over an online connection via a voice over internet protocol (VoIP) app. From Brazil to India, they almost universally requested that we use Skype.
I’m not sure it was any particular aspect of Skype that they judged superior to the competition or that they were any kind of connoisseur of VoIP apps. There were just so few on the market, and Skype was the one everybody knew, in the same way that from 2020 onward Zoom is the one everybody’s heard of.
It was never a sexy piece of software. Neither are Zoom, Meet, or Teams, for that matter. Only Apple’s FaceTime has any sort of semblance to fun, but that’s for friends’ drunken, late-night cold calls and family chats, not business meetings or interviews.
You’ll be able to transfer your existing Skype account to the free version of Teams. From now until May 5, when Skype is shut down, Skype and Teams users will be able to chat with each other in a transition period. If you don’t want to transfer your Skype account to Teams, you can export your data, such as call history, chat logs, and contacts.
Just curious and want to check it out before it’s gone on May 5, in the same way you’d throw on Grandpa’s vintage cardigan if you came across it in the attic? Download it while you can for iOS or Android and then, I don’t know, talk about the economy with your friend before you get bored and never use it again.
While I won’t miss using Skype, I’m bummed to see it disappear because it’s one more notch in the post that is the passage of time. Alongside The Office and vinyl LPs of The Strokes, it’ll go down as a cultural touchstone of the 2000s. An artifact. And now, a memory.
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