Microsoft.
this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2025
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Sometimes a product winds up in late-stage enshittification before its sector is fully developed. Just as the thing it does is beginning to fully explode, it begins to aggressively harvest its brand value. They miss the big wave, and everyone asks what happened. That’s one disadvantage in moving early. You also hit enshittification early.
Answer: Microsoft bought it.
It was bought by microsoft, that's what went wrong.
Microsoft is the EA of the Software world. It's where companies and ideas go to die.
Google: “Am I a joke to you??”
Google has a bigger graveyard, but it's mostly their stuff.
Microsoft and EA's graveyards are full of those they acquired.
Yeah anyone who used Skype at the time immediately knew what went wrong
Exactly.
Sure, but Skype was shit even before that. It had great potential though, could have become another whatsapp.
I use both daily.
It's sad that Skype is more reliable and usable.
Microsoft
Skype felt heavy, no matter the spec of the computer it felt bloated and sluggish. I'm not trading thr article, but teams is and discord took Skype outback had their way and threw Skype in a dumpster when they were done.
Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.
Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.
Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.
I did use Skype until 2010. It was rough on an Intel atom netbook lol. And the. Again on a 3rd gen i7 mobile. And again on a 4th gen desktop. All the way through I've had the opposite experience.
Cant read the article due to paywall, but, nothing "went wrong" with skype, it was and has always been utter trash. Just having your username leaked was a security breach. Skype's only merit was it was the first easy to use video calling platform that combined text, audio and streaming in one.
Theres a reason why it was so easy to move my friends group off skype to discord right when discord launched, but I havent been able to convince that same group to move from discord.
Skype had very good architecture and compared to things popular today was more usable.
It also worked with unbelievably bad connectivity.
Security-wise - advanced Linux users would run Skype under a different user, so that it couldn't access their home directory. A weird decision to be honest, since an X11 client can make full screen captures and observe keypresses all the same. Security theater is sometimes just a hobby.
Wasn't Skype the best audio/video protocol at the time? Everything else around it was terrible, but I remember that skype was the only voice call software that worked well for me on shitty connection back in the day.
My memory says that both vent and teamspeak were way better for audio, but this was also a time where no one had a mic remotely close to the average you get today. Video, yes. But skype was really buggy and often did not even work
It's so long ago that my memory might fail me. Skype didn't need a hosted server and that made it accessible.
And then Discord arrived
Yeah and like anything getting big, here we are, Discord trying to go public and fuck everything over. The cow is fat enough to be milked then butchered until it's nothing but bones and scraps.
But skype was really buggy and often did not even work
Could you please specify the time of such assessment? Because somewhere between 2009 and 2012 Skype seemed flawless for me (of course, with ICQ before it I just didn't know what's reliable offline messages and message history, so there's that).
Voice calls worked well enough over like 45kbps. Leaving space for online game traffic (I think it was something like Burden of Crown over Hamachi, not too demanding). Of course my memory might make the experience cooler than it really was.
This essentially. It was an easy voice and more importantly videocall software that was free. There were alternatives for text (ICQ, AIM) which were nice and everyone had them, and voice (Teamspeak, Mumble) which were either not free or you had to host them yourself and neither did Videocalls. So you begrugingly had a skype account too.
Cant read the article due to paywall
Woah, when did The Verge have a paywall?
My opinion is that Skype was killed by the smartphone. I used Skype from probably 2003-ish to 2008 as my only source of a home phone number to interact with people who had a phone number, as I did not have or want a cell phone or a landline. After that, I got a cell phone that people could call me on, replacing my need for skype a s aphone number source, and then various video chat and voice calling apps came along completely replacing the functionality I was using Skype for. Then when Microsoft bought it, that put a very sour taste in my mouth at the time, and there was no looking back.
Microsoft rep: "I believe you are referring to Teams."
While we are at it, what went wrong with Twitter too? Have you guys noticed Twitter kind of sucks lately?
What are you, some kind of communist woke globalist radical?
I moved in with my online girlfriend and no longer needed it.
Complete and utter disregard for their Linux community and their reliability when they swapped off p2p and onto cloud based infrastructure was a pretty big one. It was crashing multiple times a day during that stage.
Having centralized authentication servers. Otherwise MS purchase of it wouldn't kill the normal Skype, and by now it'd be probably, like ship of Theseus, actualized for modern security and other requirements. Like X-Wing Alliance and WoW and Warcraft III modding, and other iconic games getting even replacement engines.
Hotline got FOSS clients at some point, some still work, some people even make new ones.
It was hogging port 80.
So it can bypass shitty firewall setups.