• baatliwala@lemmy.worldOP
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    8 months ago

    Amazing how Skype went from a verb to the shadow realm. MS could’ve done so much more.

    • frunch@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Would seem almost intentional given the size and success of the company. How do you fuck something like that up so badly? Seems like one of those Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deals or similar

      • IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Skype was always shit. It was being first to market that made it popular. It was one of the first ways to get cheaper and free informational calling. By the time MS purchased it vent and ts became popular as well as zoom and others entering the space.

        • warbond@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I agree with you here. They just never kept up with what people wanted or needed out of a communications platform. When Discord showed it was more versatile nearly 10 years ago, my whole group switched and never looked back.

          Skype call sounds still bring specific kinds of nostalgia though.

    • the_weez@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      Word on the street is that MS couldn’t harvest the data they wanted out of Skype, even after turning off the encryption. So they let the Skype team keep on going because of reasons, while silently replacing them with teams.

  • solomon42069@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Good ol capitalism breeding innovation. And then acquiring the innovation, cloning it poorly and killing it off so the market has no access to the product and service they wanted. Innovative!

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Well yeah “shutting down” here is more like “absorbed” into teams. They don’t make “enough” money from consumers to keep it going, but they do from their teams subscriptions. The tech is and will further be ported to teams and the branding changed.

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Wait…MICROSOFT owns skype??? Was this always the case, or did they do something stupid where they bought skype during the heyday, and immediately tank it just a few years before the pandemic? Because Zoom really had a field day in 2020.

    So, which is it? Did they always own it, or were they a buyer of an established skype that tanked it like Verizon did with tumblr? Or that other company did with myspace?

    • beerclue@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      They’ve owned it since 2011. When they did buy it, they had Lync, which sucked pretty bad. Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.

      • cm0002@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.

        And the resulting horror show is just as bad as you’d imagine to :/

    • noughtnaut@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      My father, who worked for a huge computer manufacturer, was once approached by two young dudes asking for a server for their new startup. He listened to their proposition but couldn’t see how they were going to stay in business, so he turned them down and they went elsewhere for their hardware.

      This was the two founders of Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, some 20 years ago.

  • fubarx@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Remember to break this news gently to your elderly parents.

    • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Skype is what I usually use to video chat with them but I recently got my mom to download Signal, which is nice

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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    8 months ago

    Immigration Canada: “Prove to us that your marriage is genuine. Prove that it wasn’t for immigration purposes.”

    My wife and I: “You sure you want that?”

    Immigration Canada: “Make with the proof.”

    My wife and I: 400 pages, front and back, of Skype call logs/timestamps. A fucking literal ream of paper