RIP Skype - My Digital friend who lost their way
It’s 2006. I’m a young adult, fresh back from Los Angeles after a two-year hiatus as a recruiter for a corporate cult. The internet had changed so much. Dial-up internet had finally phased out of my parents’ home, MySpace was the new cool online network, and MSN was now the messenger of choice. It was a time right when smartphones were beginning to blow up, slowly setting the pace for the shift from a luxury into a necessity. It was a simpler time. I’m not a nostalgic person by any means. In fact, many of my friends and podcast listeners will say I’m anti-nostalgia, as I try to view the past more objectively rather than through rose-colored glasses.
Long-distance charges still existed for landlines, and cell phones charged per-minute usage, except after 9 PM on weekdays and during weekends. For those who had cell phones, texting was slowly becoming the norm, with T9 being the favored texting method—which, for the life of me, I still can’t figure out. But Skype had a cool feature that allowed users to call phone numbers and even have their own dedicated digital phone number.
With Skype’s ability to call phone numbers, it was truly bridging two worlds that, at the time, were unable to connect. Encountering this for the first time filled me with such joy. I was able to really connect with many of my friends from Los Angeles, but also across the U.S., and (as I would later find out) the world. Skype provided me with a little bit of independence in the way that some people had their own cell phone.
For a person living in the rural Midwest in the mid-2000s—right before starting college—MySpace and World of Warcraft were my way of making new friends. Much like past messaging apps I had used, conversations would eventually be taken offline and were not limited by the platform we originally connected on. With Skype, it was slightly different because we were still online, but able to connect better with phone and video calls. Skype had messaging as well, but that wasn’t its main selling feature as much as real-time audio and video connections.
Being able to video chat (as it was called at the time) with friends across the world—even in Thailand—was something I had never thought was possible. Experiencing it for the first time filled me with such awe that I nearly forgot how to have a conversation. Yes, the connection was absolute trash and would break up from time to time, but the awesomeness of it was enough to forgive it and enjoy connecting with another human being in another part of the world.
Skype had many use cases in my life. It was also good as a voice chat app for online gaming. If there wasn’t a Ventrilo server to connect to, my friends and I would call each other on Skype. We did this until Discord eventually replaced it.
Skype would later set the foundation for remote work, which I specialize in and have been doing since my internship during my last year at university in the early 2010s. We used Skype for video calls and meetings across the world. The application I had used for video chatting and gaming had a business use. For a social person like me, this was an easy transition. My boss at the time predicted that eventually Skype would go under, mostly due to its acquisition by Microsoft, implying that everything Microsoft acquires or touches eventually turns to crap. Generally, my former boss was a contrarian with business predictions, but this was the one case where he was right to be concerned.
Like most tech, it kept getting worse after being acquired by a large company. Skype wore out its welcome by slowly turning into bloatware that was pre-installed on every Windows computer. By the mid to late 2010s, Google Hangouts (now Google Meet) had become the new conference norm, replacing Skype and becoming a SaaS product that didn’t require separate installation on a computer to use. My opinion on Google has changed drastically over the years, but in the 2010s, they were at their peak. They were cool, worked well, and competing products didn’t compare. Skype was overshadowed by Google.
In 2019, Microsoft announced that Skype for Business would be replaced by Microsoft Teams. Skype for non-business users still existed separately from Teams. When the pandemic hit, everyone began using other conference tools like Zoom. I was unaware at the time that Skype for Business was being rolled into Microsoft’s gross corporate business suite, which made me question, “What happened to Skype?” This was literally the golden opportunity to use the app. It blew my mind. The app that I had used for a good portion of my life for the very reason of connecting people in different places all across the world sat dormant while other video conferencing apps took over. In the immortal words of Avatar: The Last Airbender: “But when the world needed him most, he vanished.”
Skype faced a slow death at the hands of Microsoft—from bloatware to being rolled into its Teams suite. Skype had a good run, and I’m sad to see its legacy tarnished by corporate acquisition and decommission. As Skype now experiences its sunsetting, I reflect on how this app influenced my personal life and career.
Take care, Skype. You helped me build many personal and professional relationships that I still treasure to this day. It’s a shame Microsoft did you dirty. May you find peace in the void with Cortana and Clippy.
