Farewell Skype, the platform will be closed on May 5th

After more than twenty years of service (here, even ten years ago, we explained how to prepare a winning job interview on the platform), Skype He is preparing to say goodbye. Microsoft has in fact officially announced that the historic communication platform – now without work teams dedicated and left for years to itself – will be closed the May 5th. The decision is not entirely surprising: Skype has long lost ground compared to competitors such as Zoom – exploded in 2020 during the Covid -19 pandemic – and WhatsApp, while Microsoft has gradually focused on Teamsits company collaboration and communication service. What remains of Skype will in fact be absorbed by Teams. On the other hand, now calls and video calls are possible on each messaging application, Skype had lost every sense of existing and at the bottom right, having never smooth out some cars that, despite having been the first platform to experiment with VoIP technologies, have always made it a little too labyrinthine.

Skype’s story: from revolution to decline

Launched in 2003 by a group of Scandinavian and Estonian developers, Skype changed the way people communicated online, offering for the first time Calls and free videos and videos On a global level and putting against, for a long time, the telecommunications giants. In 2011 – after a passage from Ebay – the Microsoft led by the then to Steve Ballmer (the same as the Nokia operation a few years later) acquired Skype for 8.5 billion dollarsintegrating it into its services but often disordered and strategy without strategy. The fastest, most intuitive and decidedly higher usability explosion had in fact already retired Skype for years, although in some contexts it is still widely used.

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There are no confirmations in this sense and, on the contrary, it is a half -recurring half buffaloes already sprouted in 2021. However, there is another functionality in defense of privacy

The launch of Microsoft Teams in 2017 also formally marked the beginning of the end for Skype. With a deeper integration in the suite Office 365Teams quickly became the fulcrum of corporate communication, offering advanced features that went well beyond simple video calls. The giant of Redmond focuses a lot, wrongly or reason and carrying some typical complexities of that reality, and Skype has become a dead dead over time.

«The world has changed. Not only from a technical or digital point of view but precisely in size – he comments Mario Moroniinnovation expert, successful podcacaster with The caféa Vanityfair – In 2003, the year of birth of Skype, we Westerners were in the middle of the discovery of A world that was enlarged. The feeling of talking to everyone quickly and almost freely threw us into the foam. Making a video call with the other part of the world was new and widen our economic and cultural borders hand in hand with the Erasmus era and globalization. Today this closure tells us a planet that for us Westerners it gets out of itis more achievable, already seen, almost obvious: the end of social media and the beginning of the social AI era, microcommune, has also isolated us in micro-community. Centuries seem to have passed but in only twenty years the news tells us therefore that The story opens and closes to accordion Making not only the time we live but also the limits and physical space we perceive every day at the level of communication, politics and experience ».

What happens now?

Microsoft has ensured that the transition will be managed as fluidly as possible. Skype users will be able to switch to Teams using the same credentials, and theirs Chat, contacts and chronology they will be transferred automatically. In addition, for a limited period, it will be possible to communicate between Skype and Teams, avoiding sudden interruptions.