Microsoft hanging on Skype: Service to close May 5, 2025
After starting the market to make online calls 23 years ago, Skype closes. Microsoft, who got the correspondence and communication application 14 years ago, said it would retire from active service on May 5 to double the difference. Skype users have 10 weeks to determine what they want to do with their account.
It is not clear how many people are affected. The latest numbers that Microsoft shared in 2023, when she said she had more than 36 million users – was out of the 300 million Skype peak.
“We know this is a big deal for our Skype users, and we are very grateful to support them for Skype and all the lessons that have been taken in the teams during the past seven years,” Jeff Tiber, head of Microsoft 365 Cooperative Applications, told Techcrunch in an interview this week. “At this point, we will allow us to put all our focus behind the teams to provide a more simplicity and push innovation faster.”
Between now and 5 May, users will have the option to deport all their contacts and chat data to the Microsoft Team platform. Instead, users can download their Skype data using the applied export tool.
The issue of work
The news will come a big surprise for those who have followed Skype in recent years, and in many ways, writing on the wall since 2016, when Microsoft appeared for the first time in teams.
While Microsoft Skype launched the commercial product in 2015, the arrival of Teams indicated a new direction for Microsoft in the cloud communication space. Many teams likened to reproduce the recession, but the biggest ambition was building a platform that would provide space for cooperation and communication through a wide range of Microsoft and other applications, which included chat, video and text – direct overlap with Skype.
Microsoft later revealed plans to gradually get rid of Skype for Business in 2017, as these efforts concluded after four years, in 2021. In the same year, Microsoft chose the difference as an integrated connection application in Windows 11, and Skype deported to side lines.
Quickly forward until December 2024, Techcrunch stated that Microsoft has stopped allowing Skype users to add credit to their accounts, or buy Skype phone numbers, and pushing users to monthly subscriptions and Sky-to-Pehone instead.
Thus, this takes us to today’s news, indicating the end of the brand and the company that was one of the first startups in the field of major technology that was launched outside Europe on the days of Dawdling Dial-UP.
Skype’s Death Canell comes two years after Microsoft began offering a fully rebuilt deskrosoft deskrosoft surface and Web Teams. In these two years, Teper says consumers who call the teams have grown four times, although he refused to specify the number of consumers who make up the base of users of 320 million.
“It is widely enough, we feel wonderful towards the app (difference) for personal use,” Tiber said. “We feel that we have miles under our belt on adoption by consumers, (who) using a difference in their personal lives. We thought about (stop Skype) for a period of time, but we really felt that the product had to show the user’s final dependence with consumers telling us that he is ready.”
Microsoft believes that consumers are now ready.
User numbers
While Skype entered into a new era of online connections, starting with sound before expanding the video and sharing files, the arrival of smartphones and a set of new messaging applications affected the number of Skype users over the years. For the context, the postsapp sacrifices after the two billion users in 2020.
When Skype applied public subscription in 2010, she revealed 560 million registered users and 124 million active users. But instead of moving away from her accession from EBY (which she acquired in 2005), Microsoft made a $ 8.5 billion offer for Skype in 2011 and grew a platform to 300 million users in 2013.
Microsoft is not used to dismantling the numbers of Skype users in subsequent years, although it disturbed the cross data point. At the beginning of the epidemic in March 2020, the company revealed that Skype had grown by 70 % on a monthly basis to 40 million users per day, as people sought to stay in contact with their loved ones during insurance-a trend that was born a similar storm in competitive platforms such as parity.
The last update was presented by Microsoft through a blog publication published in early 2023, where it announced a complementary between Skype and its Bing search engine, as it revealed that “more than 36 million people use Skype Daily to call through phone calls and chats” worldwide.
Nevertheless, this long and cheap growth is that the growth of the difference and the surface of Skype is one of the reasons why Microsoft is now the time to go to the difference.
“Skype took a stumbling block – as the difference did – during the epidemic, and Skype was largely stable in the past two years,” Tiber said. “We felt that time, and comments were so that we could take this step.”
My house
Microsoft encourages users to move to the teams for free. This provides some additional features that are not available in Skype, such as calendar integration, but free teams lack the other main features that were special for Skype-specifically, the phone call functions that allowed users to connect to the numbers of portable lines and landline, in addition to receiving phone calls with the Skype phone number.
Microsoft started postponing these services again in December, preventing users from adding any additional credit to their accounts while stopping the purchase of Skype numbers. Users were still able to make calls for phone numbers with a valid monthly subscription or any remaining balance they had, but the subscription renewal will end on April 3.
For old users who are still getting credit in their accounts, Microsoft will provide Skype phone call platform at Skype Web and in the difference for an unlimited period.
“We will support (this) as long as users have credit and use this function,” said Microsoft VP of Amit Fulay for Techcrunch.
Despite the embodiment of institutions for the teams that offer phone call functions, Foulele emphasized that free teams will not support PSTN services (the public transformed phone network), most of them due to the transformation of consumer trends.
He said: “We have searched the use of phone calls for a period of time on Skype, patterns changed, use changed, and this is a step towards that.” “People have mobile data plans, and when this (phone) job appeared several years ago, this was not the case.”
Regime deportation
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 automatically. Skype will continue to work alongside, until May 5, 2025.
Instead, users will be able to export their data, although there will actually be all that they will be able to do in terms of import it anywhere else.
“We wanted to make sure that during this transition, people do not lose their contacts, their memories.” We want to make sure that we keep all the things that people have shared. If they choose to come to the difference, we will return all their contacts and data. “
If the user does not take any action by May 5, Skype says he will keep the user’s data until the end of the year, after which it will be deleted.
blurred lines
One of the large fast food of all this is how the lines between business and consumer worlds are not clear, partly due to societal standards about technology and trends such as remote work.
Skype began as a consumer producer spreading in business, while the teams began as a commercial product transported by the consumer. The difference today, though, is still Feel Like a business product, especially because of his name. Do you see families and friends themselves as part of a large “team”?
Teper, for his part, does not see this as a problem, given that many of its current products already exceed the limits of the state of use.
He said: “I think many people will move (from Skype to the difference).” “If you are thinking about Word, Excel, PowerPoint, these are brands that work for commercial and personal use of people. We have children and parents who do their duty in words, and budgets in Excel, so we have a good precedent about our tools used in personal life and working life.”