MichaelBTech

“If you don’t cannibalize yourself, someone else will” a saying I believe Steve Jobs said likely expressing his sentiment during the development of products like the iPhone, which cannibalized the iPod market.

Tom Warren, from the Verge:

Skype will be retired on May 5th, and existing users will need to export their data or migrate to Teams.

Microsoft will now be fully focused on Teams for consumers, after launching the personal version in 2020. At the time, Microsoft said it was still fully committed to Skype, but it’s been clear in recent years that the company was preparing for the eventual retirement of Skype. In December, Microsoft killed off Skype credits and phone numbers in favor of subscriptions, another sign that the end of Skype was nearing.

“Initially the vision was to have one experience across work and life… but Teams was new and that was not realistically where we were in 2020,” reveals Teper. “So we continued to invest in Skype, and about two to three years ago we started bringing in the free Teams consumer experience with the new client. We wanted to wait until the adoption was at the scale where we could be very convinced it was the right time.”

It’s certainly the end of an era. Personally, I never used Skype as much as most people did. In fact, I believe at one point Skype was the number one video chatting experience that ushered in the Jetsons futuristic approach of communication. Skype had a head start, but during the pandemic didn’t seem to be the go-to for people wanting to connect. That went to Zoom.

I still think Google Meet is in the best position to hold the spot for both consumer based and business based video based communication.