Microsoft has officially announced Windows 11, its new operating system which will replace the current version over the next few years.
Among all the new features are two seemingly small but related things that jumped out.
First – Microsoft Teams, the video-calling app which saw a boom during 2020’s pandemic, will be integrated into Windows 11 by default.
And second – Skype will not be, for the first time in years.
That seems to suggest that Teams is the new favourite child, and many pundits think this is the beginning of the end for what was once the king of calling apps.
“Looks like Microsoft is killing off Skype,” wrote the Irish & Sunday Independent tech editor Adrian Weckler. “Bye bye Skype,” added Future Publishing’s content director Jeremy Kaplan. “RIP Skype,” was the immediate reaction from The Verge’s Tom Warren.
Yet the reality is that Skype has been losing relevance for a long time.
‘The future’
Microsoft bought Skype 10 years ago for $8.5bn (£6.1bn). At the time, it was the tech giant’s biggest-ever acquisition, and there were questions over whether it was over-paying.
But Microsoft was buying into an app that had been downloaded one billion times and had hundreds of millions of users.
“Together we will create the future of real-time communications,” Microsoft chief Steve Balmer projected.
It seemed to work – the app came bundled with every new computer, and user numbers were strong.
But by the middle of the decade, internet forums were full of posts asking “why is Skype so bad?” and complaining about updates. Many pointed to poor performance and questionable design choices.
At the same time, mobile messaging apps – such as WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger – were exploding in popularity and started to introduce video calls, one of Skype’s main attractions.