I'm really disappointed in the limited media coverage I've seen about Skype shutting down today that they aren't mentioning that Microsoft bought Skype and absolutely ran it into the ground. It is a story of gross mismanagement and a tech giant throwing away money and making the world worse. - ThreadSky

lacci.bsky.social • 4 days ago

I'm really disappointed in the limited media coverage I've seen about Skype shutting down today that they aren't mentioning that Microsoft bought Skype and absolutely ran it into the ground. It is a story of gross mismanagement and a tech giant throwing away money and making the world worse.

Comments

rammolo.bsky.social•4 days ago

M$ purchased Skype in May 2011, with the new technology it became obsolete .

https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/

lacci.bsky.social•4 days ago

The article is paywalled.

I can see the author though. I had the misfortune of being harassed by him once because I didn't care for an article. That was before he got convicted and sentenced to prison for 12 years for being a pedophile. I'm surprised they haven't pulled down all his stories.

rammolo.bsky.social•4 days ago

They purchased one from Sybari Software.

lacci.bsky.social•4 days ago

Buying companies for their technology and engineering skill and then kind of letting their product line wither or cancelling it as they shift them to new priorities has sort of been the MO for super big tech companies. The one that I always think of is P.A. Semiconductor that Apple bought in 2008.

lacci.bsky.social•4 days ago

I mostly think of that one because I followed the company before they got acquired, I was in college and some of my friends even thought about working there, and it was the first time a tech company I was really paying attention to got acquired.

rammolo.bsky.social•4 days ago

I have worked with M$, and they actually purchased Skype, Linked in, Spyglass that it's now named Edge browser, by the time being the only way was to buy a newly web browser which competed with Netscape, they purchased the browser for quite a few millions, and they never developed an anti-virus.

rammolo.bsky.social•4 days ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc.

mangoritas.bsky.social•4 days ago

we're seeing this happen in real-time to a lot of other companies, too (looking at you, X and Instagram)

nyube.bsky.social•4 days ago

They did the same to Nokia. I am still salty about that.

chris090.bsky.social•4 days ago

It’s really wired

gilles41.bsky.social•4 days ago

They possibly want to run it into the ground, and declare it a failure and file a bankruptcy.

vawanderer.bsky.social•4 days ago

Small companies buy innovators to grow. Large companies buy innovators to prevent them.

The second Microsoft bought Skype, it was only a matter of time before it was gone. The money and market share they gained in removing a competitor was probably worth every cent to MS.

tksquared.bsky.social•4 days ago

That ring tone is legendary.

lacci.bsky.social•4 days ago

To be fair to Microsoft (not something I particularly like to do) I don't think they ever really planned to care about Skype. They wanted Skype's technology, patents, and developers to throw into Teams.

lacci.bsky.social•4 days ago

Teams really sucks in my experience (YMMV) but Teams brings Microsoft something like $8 billion a year in revenue because they don't have to build a good product to sell it like crazy to corporations. Especially if it's part of an integrated package.

lacci.bsky.social•4 days ago

SAAS is incredibly lucrative and I really hate it. It's just rent seeking but somehow they actually pitch their rent seeking as beneficial to their customers. It's wild.

lacci.bsky.social•4 days ago

With respect to the Skype acquisition, I don't really think it's ok as a society to let a company destroy something that makes tens of millions of people's lives better just so that they can strip it for parts to incorporate into their giant crappy anticompetitive corporate software package, but 🤷‍♀️😞.

bonkski.bsky.social•3 days ago

Sucks...

dawnelyse.bsky.social•4 days ago

I just heard this news today, too. Can you still log in?

lacci.bsky.social•4 days ago

I don't know whether you can still do chats or make calls but you can log in and access your chat/call logs and contacts and stuff until January 1, 2026. You can export them or send them to teams. After that they're deleting everything I think.

charminggrump.bsky.social•4 days ago

They bought Swiftkey for its AI(spell checking) in 2016, and then for the next 9 years it has gotten worse and qorse.

bobbyandlila.bsky.social•3 days ago

Agreed. 100% Microsoft fuckers destroy everything good we have 😤 I will miss Skype forever. No messenger app has as much history as Skype.

lacci.bsky.social•3 days ago

Well there was AIM. I remember how surprisingly devastated I felt when they finally killed AIM in December of 2017. It was really super open. People built really advanced stuff into clients for AIM that I haven't seen replicated since.

lacci.bsky.social•3 days ago

I had an AIM client in the '00s (Adium) that had a plugin that let you type LaTeX equations in and then it would render the math as an image and send it to the person you were chatting with. It was *incredibly* useful as a physics student and it worked very well.

lacci.bsky.social•3 days ago

We could actually easily work on physics problems together on AIM and it wasn't clunky and even looked really good. I haven't run into anything like that on any major chat or social media platform since. Maybe there's one somewhere. The free internet had some really awesome stuff.

adamfendrich.bsky.social•4 days ago

Pre-acquisition it was a great tool, at some point after that the interface became painfully complicated. Didn't you have to actually schedule a call in Outlook to get it to connect? Numbingly bad

arty-san.bsky.social•4 days ago

Yes. I was using Skype regularly and it was simple and reliable until Microsoft bought it. Then the interface gets complicated, calls don't go through. For a long time it was a mess. Eventually it was somewhat working again but by then it was too late.
I agree, gross mismanagement.

tv-transcripts.bsky.social•4 days ago

This is no surprise!

Wind back the clock. The NSA offered "billions" to any firm which could offer reliable eavesdropping on Skype IM and voice traffic.

M$ bought it, "cracked it", replaced MSN Messenger, & presumably collected billions.

Nowadays, any IM is a management nightmare, due to snooping

bonkski.bsky.social•3 days ago

GTFOH!
https://bsky.app/profile/carnage4life.bsky.social/post/3lohnq3hxk22i

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