What went wrong with Skype?

is a senior editor and author of Notepad , who has been covering all things Microsoft, PC, and tech for over 20 years. Skype was Microsoft’s biggest-ever acquisition in 2011, a deal brokered by former CEO Steve Ballmer when the company was trying to compete with the rise of the iPhone. But after spending $8.5 billion on Skype, Microsoft dropped the ball again and again over the past 14 years, to the point where Skype was so irrelevant during a global pandemic that everyone used Zoom instead. Skype has been relegated to a forgotten relic of an era before Google and Apple’s mobile dominance, and Microsoft is now laying it to rest alongside other failed mobile efforts like Windows Phone. It wasn’t always this way, though. In early 2012, a few months after Microsoft’s acquisition, I visited the Skype offices in Stockholm that engineers had just moved into. Skype had just passed 41 million concurrent users, more than even Steam’s recent record. Skype was so popular at the time that peopl ... Read full article.