CNBC created a 15-minute video titled “The Rise and Fall of Skype,” which chronicles its years-long history until its demise.
Skype was developed in 2003, in just nine months, by a group of six childhood friends in Estonia. "We were smart engineers," says former Skype CTO Ahti Heinla. "We learned along the way. None of us had a history of telecommunications.”
But at the end of it CNBC interview, admits that “I myself rarely use Skype anymore. I still have it installed on my phone, but my main methods of communication are now elsewhere!.”
GigaOm founder Om Malik says it was Skype's mistakes that allowed WhatsApp to grow massively.
Watch the video below, and since it has subtitles you can see them in direct translation into Greek:
For the record, Skype was bought in 2002 by eBay. But this deal did not go as well as expected and a group of investors led by Silver Lake bought the majority stake.
Then Microsoft stepped in, paying $2011 billion in 8,5 to become the owner. Even with the backing of the world's largest software company, Skype is fading into obscurity.
During the pandemic, consumers and business workers turned to tools like Zoom and Meta's WhatsApp.
Since then there are now a large number of options for quickly connecting with groups of friends and colleagues via smartphone. Microsoft pushed Skype to Outlook and Windows and even enriched the application with the Bing AI chatbot, but the result did not change.
In March 2020, Microsoft announced that Skype had 40 million daily active users, a figure that has since dropped to 36 million, according to a spokesperson. In contrast, Microsoft's newest communication app Teams is growing in popularity, with nearly 250 million monthly users as of July 2021.
Microsoft Teams hit an all-time high of 300 million active users in the second quarter of 2023, according to the CNBC video report.
The current head of Microsoft's Skype didn't speak in the CNBC video, but he wasn't quoted in it either.
Just as an epilogue, Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype's original developers, had this to say:
“I don't know what the future holds for Skype. I'm worried about people going extinct, so it's unlikely we'll need Skype if that happens."
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