4 ms·

I would also add that Skype blew it. This should have been their market. Today, I don’t even have skype installed anywhere.

• dhosek 6y ago
  My wife used to use Skype a lot back in the '00s, particularly for international calls (she actually had setup a paid plan with a dial-in number in Mexico that connected to her and a dial-in number in the US that connected to her mother to make cross-border calls extra easy). I remember using the app on my iPhone to call home from Morocco as if I was making a regular call. Then they had an issue where their iPhone app would run in the background needlessly and such down battery life. Add in T-Mobile offering free international calls and roaming and I can't remember the last time I used Skype. It is still installed on my phone and hasn't been off-migrated so I must have clicked on the icon accidentally sometime in the past year or two.
• qppo 6y ago
  That's more of a story of Microsoft acquiring and destroying a brand. They took the consumer software and rebranded their enterprise communications suite under it, then rebranded that and now no one "skypes" anyone anymore. Microsoft originally had a product suite called Lync which had chat and calling. It was pretty good. Then MS rebranded it as "Skype for Business." It was the same infrastructure and program with a facelift to use Skype's styling. That did not work out well, and was rebranded as Microsoft teams. I'd suspect the whole point of acquiring Skype was to move it to enterprise, which it only did cosmetically and turned out to be a failure. MS Teams is alive and well though.