[RINGTONE] Hi! Wait. Can you hear me?
Give me one second. How about now? Great!
Hi! Do you remember me? You’re old friend Skype?
Gosh, we were INSEPARABLE back in 2010-2011. Remember the HOURS of video chatting we used to do together? Video games?
prank calls? Even overnight calls! Haha!
Remember when we couldn’t do sleepovers, we would do SKYPE-overs? Just leave the call on the whole night and then wake up. So, what have you been up to all these years later?
Wow, you’re married? You have a kid? Wow.
Club Penguin isn’t around anymore? Gosh, where did all the time go? Wait.
Who the hell is Zoom? —(HANG UP) Every person, regardless of upbringing or background, has those specific collective memories, shared experiences, that are powerful enough to define a whole generation. And if you’re the right age, one of those key memories involved a little program called Skype.
Since its creation in 2003, it quickly became the top video chatting service in the entire world. Its easy-to-use and creative user-interface and convenient tools even allowed it to be ingrained into contemporary pop-culture. It became a plot-device in movies and even became its own verb, much like how the world “google” is used today.
“I’m gonna go skype my friend. ” Skype was everywhere and you could not avoid it. Until one day, it kind of just disappeared, pretty much overnight, and alternatives just took over.
But the weird thing is that…none of us really cared? When Skype moved on, so did we. No one has really looked back, despite Skype providing things that, I think, are now missing within the online space.
And this is where I would typically ask “So, what exactly happened to Skype? ” but its situation is part of a very interesting and unique phenomenon. Was Skype the one that changed, or was it us?
And how did it ever get to that point? [DIALING SOUND] Uh oh! Are you a SQUARE?
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[BOOM] Ha! Ha! Ha!
So check out Squarespace! Yee-haw! Let’s go back to the 1990s.
You have this new thing called the World Wide Web, which built on top of a slightly older thing called the Internet. You know how you could talk to people on the telephone? Well, what if you could do that but with a computer instead?
Now, why would anybody want to do that, when a telephone is more than enough? Well, given that computers were super complex machines with almost endless capabilities, this could create a great opportunity for all kinds of mediums of communication; the technology just needed more time to get better. And so naturally, throughout the 90s, a lot of people sense some doubt about the computer’s true potential.
". . .
you could listen to a baseball game on your computer. Does radio ring a bell? " [LAUGHTER] And then you have the release of American Pie.
♫ Did you write-♫ No, not THAT American Pie. THIS American Pie; the VERY raunchy 1999 teen comedy. And the tremendous success of this movie brought a TON of mainstream exposure to a concept that was finally becoming more of a reality: video communication.
"What am I gonna do? Huh? Broadcast her over the internet?
" "You can do that? " What instant messaging did to usenet newsgroups, video chat was going to do to telephones. Now, video chatting wasn’t unheard of at this time.
In fact, the idea predates the internet…by over a CENTURY. The concept went as far back as the late 1800s; the idea of sending pictures over telegraph, not JUST letters. And over the next couple of decades, scientists would take a crack at this, with one calling it “television,” ever heard of it?
But computers brought it to TRUE fruition, and it was only getting EASIER to access everyday. And by the late 90s, people like you AND me could video stream from our bedrooms, and American Pie knocked that into the heads of thousands of teenagers and young adults. "God bless the internet.
" But how do you take this complicated technology and targeted it towards young people? Well, this was technically already happening; oddly enough, through PIRACY! Programs like LimeWire, Naspter, Kazaa, were allowing computer users ALL over the world to connect with one another and share files in a way that was easy to understand.
Okay cool, but what does that have to do with telecommunication? Well, illegal file-sharing and what would soon be “video chat” share one thing in common: the peer-to-peer protocol. If you wanted to downloaded a file, Napster, for example, didn’t need to host that file.
It would just connect you directly to the napster user that had the file in question and you would download it from them! Napster doesn’t have to host anything, making it super cheap to run, everybody wins. But the popularity of all these programs showed that such a great technology can be abused.
How can P2P be used on a large, commercialized scale, LEGALLY? Well, two of the founders of Kazaa, funnily enough, decided to give this a try. What if instead of transferring files, you transferred your voice?
Calling someone internationally is expensive. What if you could call someone overseas, P2P style? Meaning there was no middleman in charge of all that bandwidth, but instead each party only has to worry about THEIR share of the bandwidth.
It was basically like toll-free numbers, but it goes BOTH ways. This technology would be known as “Voice Over IP” or “VoIP” or short. Although they weren’t the inventors of it, these two creators wanted to figure out a way to popularize this technology and make it easy to use LIKE Napster.
Much like using a telephone, all you need to do is push a button. And so, they got to work on their on their Sky Peer-to-Peer service, or Skype for short. And during its early beta stages, the program was VERY simple in its functionality and had a VERY simple business model, but that’s all it needed.
Name a better way of targeting to young adults than through making a service that’s easy to use and install, and completely FREE, since the program required VERY little hosting. Instead, they made money through private investing and offering the option to use an E-Number to call regular phones at an affordable price. The simplicity of the idea gave the program a lot of buzz and soon Skype was blowing up.
There was now a more convenient, more intimate alternative to instant messaging. Just talk to your friend on the phone, over the internet. For those of you who showed up to Skype a bit later in the game may be surprised that Skype was primarily known for the VoIP features; the video chatting didn’t come until later, because naturally technology still had a ways to go in the early 2000s before it could really reach its full potential.
Movies like American Pie showed us what that potential looked like, but video chat was still VERY choppy, low resolution, and that’s because you were, more often than not, broadcasting over DSL. But over the years, things would get better, and higher quality VIDEO chatting was becoming more of a possibility. And throughout the 2000s, programs like iChat and Windows Live Messenger would start introducing, well, video!
And in 2005, Skype, is acquired by eBay for $2. 7 Billion! Being partially motivated by fears of overpaying for the product, they got to work.
Ebay also saw this as a great opportunity to make the features of Skype useful for traditional eBay transactions, in the hopes that purchases could be more transparent. Want to get a better view of the TV set you want to buy, want to ask the buyer a bunch of questions? Well, then just video call them!
While this component of the program didn’t really take off, the concept of video was enough at the time. And so, in January of 2006, video calling was officially introduced to Skype! Despite being a little bit later to the game relative to these OTHER services, Skype had some special things to its advantage.
For one, the simplicity of its design made it INCREDIBLY lightweight as a program, making it flexible for all types of computers. It wasn’t heavy on hardware, it didn’t take up a ton of bandwidth or hard-drive space, and most importantly it allowed you to receive and make calls to REAL phone numbers! At the time, Programs like Live Messenger could MAKE calls to real phone numbers, but couldn’t receive incoming calls, and iChat didn’t have the feature at all.
And if I could just insert my personal opinion, Skype just *looks* a lot warmer and friendlier. It’s clear that the program took full advantage of all those gradients and bright colors that were popular in the design-world at the time, which made the program just feel so much more alive. Messenger at least tried to emulate this, but it still felt like a utilitarian, business-y program.
Really the closest thing that I could see emulating this design was iChat, but again they didn’t have the same number of features that Skype did and, despite offering a Windows version, primarily catered and targeted Mac users. With Skype already having the huge userbase it did at the time, all these reasons compounded its success and Skype’s popularity would just snowball with the introduction of video. Throughout the rest of the 2000s, a HUGE emphasis would be placed on webcam culture.
With the invention of the MacBook introducing the iSight camera, attachable webcams becoming increasingly cheaper, shows like iCarly planting the idea of web broadcasting into the minds of young people, among a ton of other things, the demand for Skype would only grow. By 2010, Skype would have more than 530 million users and be the largest VoIP service in the whole world. The ability to video call your friends while ALSO calling REGULAR phone numbers all at the same time, was REVOLUTIONARY to say the least!
Over the years, the program just kept adding additional features like screen sharing that made the options and possibilities for online activities SO flexible for the time. It just felt like an easy, warm, FUN program; something that perfectly encapsulated the desires and ambitions of a young person at the time, even IF it had many practical uses within a business setting. And Microsoft saw this!
Despite Windows Live Messenger being MUCH more popular as a communications tool, they knew there was something different and special about Skype. It was THIS and the fact that they wanted to get a stronger hold on the VoIP market, the LARGEST market. To take the pros of both programs and consolidate them into one SUPER program.
They would want to keep the Skype name because it well, rolls off the tongue easier, and is more recognizable in this regard. In short, Microsoft was interested in buying Skype. eBay had already sold it to Silver Lake in 2009, but Microsoft then purchased it in May of 2011 for $8.
5 billion. At the time, it was the most expensive purchase Microsoft ever made. And this would the beginning of the end for the program.
It would all TRULY start with a little operating system called Windows 8. “App culture” was what ultimately killed Skype. In around 2011-2012, we see a lot of changes occur within the software industry.
Skeuomorphic, photorealistic designs are ditched in favor of simplistic, flat designs, and thanks to the new popularity of tablets, applications are being prioritized over traditional window executable programs. And in retrospect, this change does make sense. The 2000s were essentially the transitionary period between the analogue and the digital.
These photorealistic designs were meant to make computers easier to use. By subconsciously making them resemble more like real-life objects, users with little computer experience could better understood what each button did. It was the bridge between the tangible and the abstract.
And by the early 2010s, the industry felt that users had gotten the hang of it, and they were ready to be fully submerged into the computing world, and little changes like this represented that. And there wasn’t exactly anything wrong with that decision, but just ONE wrong decision could complicate things further and even disrupt the culture of the time. One of the most controversial changes that was made to Windows 8 was removing the start menu and replacing it with something called “Tiles.
” This SUPER confusing, overly flashy feature that felt more limiting than actually useful. Having to go BACK and forth between programs was a complete pain in the neck. Yes, you could use multiple programs at once, but most people didn’t know that, as Microsoft didn’t exactly do a great job at making that clear, and what a multi-windowed screen even looked like was just such an eyesore.
And Skype would be BUNDLED with Windows 8. 1, and although 8. 1 made some big improvements over the original Windows 8, this version of Skype suffered many of these problems.
What was once a lightweight, straight to the point, FAST program was now bloated with unnecessary features, slow, and complicated to use. And if you didn’t know what you were doing, it often took up the entire screen. What if you had to do a work conference call with multiple windows open at once?
This was going to be a big issue. Microsoft was trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist, and just turned what was already a great program into something that it wasn’t. That warmness was now gone, and Skype was essentially just a shadow of its former self.
It wasn’t even just the looks and unneeded features though either. Technological changes were made to Skype that actually worsened the quality of the product. The very thing that made Skype revolutionary in the first place was now becoming its biggest problem: P2P technology.
As we discussed, P2P works by sending your traffic DIRECTLY to the person you’re trying to contact, rather than just going through a middleman first, and it often does this by connecting to a bunch of other computers on the network to get to that person. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, this was very convenient. This was a time where computers were stationary, connected through a wire and often were always turned on during peak operating hours.
Not to mention that dial-up internet didn’t provide a whole lot of bandwidth. It’s no wonder that it was so popular at the time. But as the internet got MUCH bigger over time, things got much more convoluted.
Mobile devices are a great example. They constantly changing networks and are battery powered. So if you’re driving in a car and your phone dies, that is now a network that is both unpredictable and unreliable, and this can significantly disrupt a P2P network.
In other words, mobile devices are TERRIBLE for P2P networks. Now fast-forward to the early 2010s where the majority of all COMPUTERS are mobile devices…yeah, you probably see the issue here. This was actually the main cause of the great Skype blackout of 2011, where a software bug shut down a HUGE chunk of the program’s P2P network, and so tons of people had difficulty making calls.
And so, Microsoft decided to discontinue Skype’s P2P protocol in favor of a cloud-based centralized server that handled all the incoming calls. This sparked big controversy, as a lot of people were now concerned about Microsoft essentially gaining possession of all their conversations. Additionally, Microsoft’s execution of this was just done poorly.
It lead to lower quality video calls and more bugs that just made the overall experience worse. And reviews of this new Skype showed. But with Windows Live Messenger now discontinued and even iChat, AOL Instant Messenger, and just about anything else you could think of, Skype was kind of the only thing left.
So in a sort of depressing, nihilistic way, you were quite literally using a technologically inferior product a whole decade later, and you basically had no other choice, and people didn’t like that. And even when Microsoft corrected course by returning the start menu to Windows 10, Skype was still plagued with all these issues; it simply was NOT the program it used to be. It is important to also keep in mind that a LOT of these decisions were motivated by Microsoft’s goal of turning Skype into a business program.
P2P technology makes more sense with casual conversations, but in a business setting, where you’re often working with hundreds of people at once discussing more professional matters? Not so much. But when you look at a program like this, is the first thing that comes to your mind “business?
” Now of course people did use Skype to conduct business affairs, but that’s not what it became known for. The optics for Skype as being primarily for businesses just didn’t look right, and this was something that Microsoft failed to understand, and so it just kept hurting the program even further. Eventually, Microsoft felt that it would be easier to just start over completely and create the business program that they initially wanted.
The Skype name was just too tarnished at this point, and so they essentially abandoned it entirely to create Microsoft Teams, which became a much greater success. With Skype once being a friendly program for everybody, Microsoft essentially gave it an identity. A program called Discord would show up in 2015, offering a much more robust, organized, and individualized communication experience, particularly for gamers.
Then the final nail in the coffin came, of course, during the pandemic in 2020. The whole world was now in this unique, never before seen, position where they had no other choice but to stay at home all day and were unable to leave the house. The only way they could communicate or continue conducting ANY sort of business was digitally.
And just at this time comes a program called Zoom. You didn’t need to create an account with zoom, you just had to click a link. Zoom could support up to a THOUSAND people in a call at once, whereas Skype could only do 250.
Zoom could replace your background to look like something more professional and maintain your privacy. Skype wouldn’t introduce this feature until later. Zoom used better technology that made video calls higher quality.
These are just some of the MANY things Zoom had to its advantage. It was quite literally at the right place, at the right time, under the right circumstances. Just like that, Zoom became the go-to standard for professional video calling and Discord became the more casual equivalent, and so Skype essentially faded in the rearview mirror and became a relic of the distant past.
And when we take all these things into account, we can truly see just how strange and unique the demise of Skype really was. It was both beyond its control and within it at the same time. The technology that made it great was becoming impractical, and Microsoft’s approach to solving it was impractical as well, and most importantly, they didn’t even know who they were selling it to.
They basically did to Skype what they’ve been doing to Windows in recent time. Many users have complained about unnecessary bloatware and features within Windows that have just made it more difficult to use. But the thing is, it’s much easier to just find an alternative video chatting service than it is to find an entirely new operating system that has the same level of support for all the programs you need.
So, the outcomes were just much worse for Skype. If there’s anything that can be learned from the fall of Skype, it’s that sometimes less is more. You know what else could have saved Skype?
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