Thanks to Red Badger for the ping!
Posted on 02/28/2025 7:14:03 AM PST by Red Badger
After kickstarting the market for making calls over the internet 23 years ago, Skype is closing down. Microsoft, which acquired the messaging and calling app 14 years ago, said it will be retiring it from active duty on May 5 to double down on Teams. Skype users have 10 weeks to decide what they want to do with their account.
It’s not clear how many people are impacted. The most recent numbers that Microsoft had shared were in 2023, when it said it had more than 36 million users — a long way from Skype’s peak of 300 million users.
“We know this is a big deal for our Skype users, and we’re very grateful for their support of Skype and all the learnings that have factored into Teams over the last seven years,” Jeff Teper, president of Microsoft 365 collaborative Apps and platforms, told TechCrunch in an interview this week. “At this point, putting all our focus behind Teams will let us give a simpler message and drive faster innovation.”
Between now and May 5, users will have the option to migrate all their contacts and chat data over to Microsoft’s Teams platform. Alternatively, users can download their Skype data using the app’s built-in export tool.
The business case
The news will come as little surprise to those who have followed Skype in recent years; and in many ways, the writing has been on the wall since 2016, when Microsoft debuted Teams.
While Microsoft had launched a specific Skype for Business product in 2015, Teams’ arrival signalled a new direction for Microsoft in the cloud communications space. Many likened Teams to a Slack clone, but the bigger ambition was to build a platform that would give space for collaboration and communication across a wide range of Microsoft and other apps, and that included video and text chatting — a direct overlap with Skype.
Microsoft then revealed plans to phase out Skype for Business in 2017, concluding those efforts four years later, in 2021. That same year, Microsoft selected Teams as the integrated communications app of choice on Windows 11, relegating Skype to the sidelines.
Fast forward to December 2024, TechCrunch reported that Microsoft had stopped letting Skype users add credit to their accounts, or buy Skype phone numbers, pushing users to monthly subscriptions and Skype-to-phone plans instead.
And so this takes us to today’s news, signalling the end of a brand and company that was one of the first big tech startups to launch out of Europe in the dawdling days of dial-up.
Skype’s death knell comes two years after Microsoft started rolling out an entirely rebuilt, rearchitected Teams desktop and web app. In those two years, Teper says consumer calling minutes in Teams has grown four-fold, though he declined to say how many consumers make up its 320 million user-base.
“It’s at a high-enough scale that we feel great about the app [Teams] for personal use,” Teper said. “We feel we have the mileage under our belt on the adoption by consumers, [who are] using Teams in their personal lives. We’ve thought about [shutting down Skype] for a while, but we really felt like the product had to show the end-user adoption with consumers telling us it was ready.”
And Microsoft believes that consumers are now ready.
User numbers
While Skype ushered in a new era of internet-based communication, starting with voice before expanding to video and file-sharing, the arrival of smartphones and a swathe of new messaging apps have taken a toll on Skype’s user count through the years. For context, WhatsApp sailed past 2 billion users in 2020.
When Skype filed for an IPO in 2010, it revealed 560 million registered users and 124 million monthly active users. But rather than going public in the wake of its spin-off from eBay (which had acquired it in 2005), Microsoft tabled a $8.5 billion bid for Skype in 2011, and grew the platform to a peak of 300 million users in 2013.
Microsoft hasn’t made a habit of breaking out Skype user numbers in subsequent years, though it has teased the occasional data point. At the start of the pandemic in March, 2020, the company revealed that Skype had grown 70% month-on-month to 40 million daily users, as people sought ways to stay in touch with loved ones during lockdown — a trend that generated similar surges in rival platforms such as Zoom.
The most recent update Microsoft provided was via a blog post published in early 2023 announcing an integration between Skype and its Bing search engine, where it revealed that “more than 36 million people use Skype daily to connect through phone calls and chats” globally.
The long and short of this, though, is that Teams’ growth and Skype’s flatlining is one reason Microsoft reckons now is a good time to go all-in on Teams.
“Skype took a bump — as did Teams — during the pandemic, and Skype has largely been pretty stable in the last couple of years,” Teper said. “And we felt the time, and the feedback, was such that we could make the move.”
Phone home
Microsoft is encouraging users to move over Teams Free. This offers some additional features not available in Skype, such as calendar integrations, but Teams Free lacks other key features that were hallmarks of Skype — specifically, phone-calling functionality that allowed users to call mobile and landline numbers, as well as receive phone calls with a Skype phone number.
Microsoft began depreciating these services back in December, preventing users from adding any further credit to their accounts while also putting a halt on buying Skype numbers. Users were still able to make calls to phone numbers with a valid monthly subscription or any remaining credit they had, but the subscription renewals will come to an end on April 3.
For legacy users who still have credit in their accounts, Microsoft will be making a Skype Dial Pad available both in the Skype web portal and in Teams for an indefinite period.
“We’ll support [this] as long as users have credit and they’re using this functionality,” Microsoft VP of product Amit Fulay told TechCrunch.
Despite the enterprise incarnation of Teams offering phone-calling functionality, Fulay confirmed that Teams Free won’t support PSTN (public switched telephone network) services, mostly because of shifting consumer trends.
“We’ve been looking at usage of telephony for a while on Skype, and patterns have changed, usage has changed, and this is a step towards that,” he said. “People have mobile data plans, and when this [telephony] functionality came out many years ago, that wasn’t the case.”
System migration
During the transition period, Skype users will be able to download the Teams app and log-in with their Skype credentials, with all their chats and contacts migrating over automatically. The Skype app itself will continue to work in tandem, through May 5, 2025.
Alternatively, users will be able to export their data, though in reality there likely isn’t all that much they’ll be able to do with it in terms of importing it anywhere else.
“We wanted to make sure that during this transition, people aren’t losing their contacts, their memories,” Fulay said. “We want to make sure we preserve all the things people have shared. And if they choose to come to Teams, we’ll restore all of their contacts and data.”
If a user takes no action by May 5, Skype says it will retain user data until the end of the year, after which it will be deleted.
Blurred lines
One of the big takeaways from all this is how the lines between the business and consumer realms have blurred, due in part to societal norms around technology and trends such as remote work.
Skype began as a consumer product that spread into the business sphere, while Teams began as a business product that segued into consumer. Teams today, though, still feels like a business product, particularly due to its name. Do families and friends really see themselves as part of one big “team”?
Teper, for his part, doesn’t see this as a problem, given that many of its existing products already transcend use-case boundaries.
“I think a lot of people will make the transition [from Skype to Teams],” he said. “If you think about Word, Excel, PowerPoint, those are brands that work for business and personal use for people. We have kids and parents doing their homework in Word, and budgets and Excel, so we have good precedent about our tools being used in personal and work life.”
I have...Teams sucks.... really most all MS product suck these days
ICQ, lol, forgot about that one.. (little flower icon)
mIRC is still being used today, as far as I know..
Working in sales... my customers often wanted to set-up video conferences to monitor projects. Every company was standardized on their ‘favorite’ system.
For me, Zoom was the easiest to work with. But customers that were heavily oriented toward Microsoft products would require us to use Teams. My impression was that Teams was a bit too complex, but I’m sure that had I used it more I might have felt otherwise.
It does seem that to get the most out of Teams you have to have the entire Microsoft suite of products.
Far more popular with software developers and product development teams. Microsoft Teams sucks.
This is slightly off subject but I have used various VOIP (voice over internet protocol) services for the last 25 years. My initial interest was to save money on local long distance. We moved out of town about 30 years ago and we could not call people who were 25 miles away without paying local long distance to the phone company. Plus, our monthly rate kept going up, and if anyone can remember what dealing with local phone companies used to be like... Our big break came when a trench was dug and cable TV was made available to our home, something that we were told a month or two before, would “never happen”. This eventually enabled us to get “cable internet” and use VOIP service providers.
In the beginning we used Vonage but ended up switching various other VOIP providers who offered us better deals such as 8x8 and Magic Jack. Then in 2012 we discovered Google Voice using Obihai devices, this provided the same home landline telephone service for free once you purchased the device for around $40. There were a few minor glitches... in the beginning setup was fairly complicated.
The original OBi100 adapter lost its connectivity within a couple of years because of changes made to Google Voice. We had to switch to superior OBi202 adapters with 2 lines and better FAX capabilities and easier setup which cost around $70 in 2014. I helped my parents and others port their landlines to Google Voice. I ended up purchasing around half a dozen OBi202 adapters.
With the massive Covid scam, we started using Skype, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Microsoft Teams, and whatever other video calling software our friends and associates insisted on using for various needs and events. Even Google Voice can be used for Video calls when using the app on your cell phone or computer.
Unfortunately, the ownership of OBihai has been passed from one company to another over the past several years. The OBiTALK Consumer Portal was shut down on October 31, 2024, which will eventually be cause all remaining devices to stop working. HP, the current owner will not guarantee continued operation with Google Voice. While most OBiHAI devices are currently still functioning, the eventual expiration of security certificates will end their ability to use Google Voice sometime soon. Google has no plans that I know of to make similar devices to the OBihai 200 series to be used with their service... It looks like the free ride is about over.
MS tried to make SKYPE something like WEBEX or other online meeting software. DISASTER!!!! I can’t explain how bad that turned out. Unusable.
So, they squeezed all the juice they could out of it. Now they t’row it in the trash can. Disgusting.
Teams is another bloated crappy MS monstrosity.
I remember now that the second VOIP service that we subscribed to after Vonage was called “Packet 8”. It was considerably cheaper than Vonage. They were purchased by “8x8”. In the VOIP business there have always been constant buyouts and takeovers.
Anyway... I found the most recent directions to use Google Voice with an Internet Telephone Service Provider (ITSP) and a VoIP device... So, there are workarounds if you still want a free landline that uses Google Voice.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/comments/18inqwk/use_google_voice_with_an_internet_telephone/
I like to keep things simple. Give me Windows 7, Office 2010, Adobe Acrobat 10 and Photoshop CS5 and I'm fine. Skype was also simple to operate. Zoom, yes, I have that installed on my PCs now and I love it's simplicity.
Thanks to Red Badger for the ping!
Embrace the suck.
Knew nothing about Skype until I went to Panama and no cell coverage. Skype worked fine from my laptop to call home.
“The original OBi100 adapter lost its connectivity within a couple of years because of changes made to Google Voice.”
I used both until 5 years ago. Was a great free landline until.....
Now I have google voice on my smart phone. So now have 2 telephone numbers that I use. The real smart phone number plus the google voice number.
I have google voice on my desktop computer so that I can easily type and text people/ You can install google voice on a laptop or tablet and use it as a telephone. With a headset w microphone I can do same w my desktop...
With smart phone I am on google voice anywhere via phones data plan. With all the others above I must be on a Wi-Fi. Mainly on my home Wi-Fi.... But It might be Home Depots Wi-Fi or at Starbucks Wi-Fi
That is great to hear. In our case we can hook up on old android phone to our wireless handsets and answering machine using blue tooth. I just haven't had to do this. I also haven't bothered to use the Google Voice App on my primary cell phone because it has unlimited voice, data, and texts for a very low price anyway. But I have used it out and about on my tablets which work just like they are a giant handset or a speaker phone.
Google Voice has saved me and my extended family a lot of money over the years. Google has said that they have no intentions to cancel the service or even cut off the service to ObiHai devices that use the service; it supposedly was security issues that ended the OBi100. I can see that as being an issue sometime in the future with OBi200 series devices.
But there is supposedly a workaround for continued free home phone service using Callcentric... https://www.callcentric.com/
According to the link that I put in my last post this will work with Google Voice using a little configuration wizardry.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Googlevoice/comments/18inqwk/use_google_voice_with_an_internet_telephone/
Comcast is constantly trying to sign us up for their voice service. I am always baffled as to why people would do this... other than the convenience and maybe a little better reliability they are basically paying for something that they could get for free with just a little bit of research and a very small investment in hardware...
“Comcast is constantly trying to sign us up for their voice service....”
I actually like Xfinity..... low rates for internet only and they even (last year) tossed in a free Xfinity router that I use...... I have my own router too so I don’t need their freebie.. But what the hecks!
All I can say is that I like having two phone numbers on my smartphone. My take is that few people use free Google Voice on their phones. That goog is busy pimping it for business use and charging for this service
I have an el cheepo 10 inch tablet that I must put google voice on! It is Wi-Fi only.
The el cheepo Chinese 10 inch tablet, a ZONKO D106 from an Amazon Black Friday sale. It cost less than a hundred dollars and has a sim card slot. I purchased it to use with DJI Drone controllers that I have that do not have displays built into the controller. But that is another story.
I have an Ultra Mobile (T-Mobile MVNO) card installed in the laptop that costs me $3 for 100 MB, 100 calls, and 100 texts per month. You can purchase additional data, texts and calls on the fly. It is handy to have the card installed if you are in a place with no wi-fi, but I typically just use PDAnet with my cell phone with unlimited services to create a “free” hotspot if I am using the tablet where there is no Wifi. Ultra-Mobile is just kind of a cheap backup. The screen is a little low resolution (1280x800) but the speakers and microphone work well for calls. It works very well in tandem with Google Voice.
I don't know what Google's original intent was with Google Voice, but it is something that fell under the law of unintended consequences... only in a positive way. I am glad that this discussion about Skype came up because I needed a review of my VOIP dependance and usage. I am sorry to see Skype go because it was the first video phone app that I used long before Zoom and all of these other applications became popular.
I had not realized that the OBiHai services that made it so easy to set up standard land lines with Google Voice and a fairly inexpensive adapter had been phased out. It sounded pretty bad, but then I found there are fairly easy work arounds. I have a cordless phone system with 4 handsets that can use an Android cell phone to place and receive calls using Bluetooth. I haven't tried it, but I am pretty sure that this would work fine with Google Voice with some minor limitations.
ZONKO D106...... I have this D106 by a different Amazon seller. Now there is an upgrade version that takes a sim card......I have only Wi-Fi.
Chinese are churning these out by the tens of millions. Clue me in. Mine came with android 14. My understanding is no android updates by the seller or anyone?
Yes, mine came with Android 14 as well. Enough were sold that I wouldn’t be surprised to find a user group with someone who knows how to root and update the firmware at some point. In the meantime, the included version of Android is pretty new. So far everything that I have installed worked without complications.
The GPS on mine is a little weak but my guess is that it is some type of antenna related issue. Costco had a far superior Samsung Galaxy Tab A9+ 11.0” on sale around Christmas for $159 with a couple accessories. This would have been a better deal by far even without the sim card holder.
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