The Verge’s Tom Warren reports on a death in the family:
It’s the end of an era. Microsoft is shutting down Skype in May and replacing it with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers. Existing Skype users will be able to log in to the Microsoft Teams app and have their message history, group chats, and contacts all automatically available without having to create another account, or they can choose to export their data instead. Microsoft is also phasing out support for calling domestic or international numbers.
The writing has long been on the wall for Skype, which has struggled to remain relevant in the days of Zoom, Teams, Slack, FaceTime, and a million other VoIP solutions. But there was a time when Skype was a revolution: free, good sounding voice calls across the Internet. Not to mention the ability to make cheap actual phone calls internationally, in a day and age when that was usually ridiculously expensive.
In particular, Skype was a boon to the early age of podcasting, especially once Ecamm’s excellent Call Recorder for Skype hit the scene; it made recording your podcast as simple as clicking a button.
A lot of what Skype does is table stakes now, and though Microsoft acquired it in 2011, the company never really seemed that enthusiastic about it—even less so once it rolled out Teams in 2016. Still, Skype has stuck around, quietly doing its job even as users slowly migrated to other services.
Still, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for it: I spent many, many hours recording podcasts on Skype. Rest in peace, little buddy. Bleep-bloop.
