James Paul 
Before the rise of the smartphone, there was a time when Skype was the essential platform for making video calls. Its success was such that Microsoft bought it for $ 8.5 billion in 2011, by making its largest acquisition at the time. 14 years later, the Redmond firm officially put the service to oblivion. How to explain such a fall?
Difficult integration at Microsoft
During his acquisition by Microsoft in 2011, Skype had a startup culture marked by great flexibility, a light hierarchy and an agile approach to software development. Conversely, Microsoft worked with a more rigid structure, an intensive use of emails and heavy decision-making processes.
This cultural difference quickly posed a problem: Skype engineers, accustomed to great autonomy, had trouble adapting to the working methods imposed by their new owner. Especially since Microsoft has gradually dissolved the own identity of Skype, a European platform, by closing local offices like that of Stockholm.
Problem technical choices
Before its acquisition, Skype was based on a decentralized network architecture, called Peer-to-Peer (P2P). It allowed each user to connect directly to their interlocutor without going through a central server, reducing latency and load.
But in 2012, Microsoft decided to migrate Skype to a centralized infrastructure based on its Messenger service. The objective was to improve the synchronization of messages and calls on several devices, an area where P2P showed limits. The transition turned out slow and chaotic.
A degraded user experience
Many bugs have occurred in stride: interrupted calls, messages received in doubles, etc. What erode user confidence. And beyond the dysfunctions, Skype has made several design overhangs, without much success. In 2017, the interface, supposed to resemble Snapchat, was even mocked by many Internet users.
Upstream, Microsoft added emojis and other superfluous features instead of solving the fundamental problems of the application, Bringing into clumsy updates.
Increased competition
The boom in messaging like Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger or Facetime, only won the situation. Because these platforms, they immediately adapted to new mobile uses. Skype, for its part, has long kept a decadious interface.
They also offer a unified and light experience, where the sending of messages, voice calls and videos is done without friction, with impeccable synchronization between the devices. As a result, when the videoconferencing exploded in 2020, Skype was supplanted by Zoom and others, most likely signaling the start of the end for the platform.
Microsoft’s pivot to Teams
As of 2016, the Redmond firm gradually abandoned Skype in favor of Teamsplatform designed for companies and integrated into the Microsoft 365 suite. Because it was thought from the start as a collaborative tool, combining messaging, video calls, documents sharing and project management in a single workspace.
This orientation allowed Microsoft to compete with Slack and Zoom in the professional sector, in particular thanks to the boom in telework during the pandemic. But this strategy also left Skype on the tile, without real innovation or clear vision for the future.
The announcement of the closure of Skype definitively seals the choice of Microsoft to favor Teams, more strategic and monetizable product.
