Skype Finally Dies Today, Forcing Home Users To Switch To Anything But Teams

The Least Worst Way To Video Conference With Your Family Is No More

Skype was the last of the conferencing apps that focused purely on video and text chats, without the addition of dozens of features that are barely related to simply making calls over the internet.  It was originally developed by a team of Scandinavians and Estonians and was bought and sold by a variety of companies, including eBay and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board until, in 2011, Microsoft bought it to replace Windows Live Messenger.  While hardly anyone misses Messenger, we did miss the quality of service Skype offered before Microsoft bought it.  They dropped the P2P infrastructure and switched to supernodes and eventually Azure hosting, neither of which improved the quality of Skype.  Microsoft also fell in love with re-skinning it frequently, somehow making it less aesthetically pleasing with every change.

Skype has been on the chopping block for quite a while, Skype for Business is long gone, and it does seem that today marks the end of it.  That said, it will still launch and attempt calls, so perhaps it will slowly go away instead of ending abruptly.  This is going to prompt a lot of families to swap to different conferencing software and you, dear reader, are likely the one who will have to teach your relations how to set up an account, find contacts, adjust audio input and output and finally, how to make or answer a call.

Teams is unlikely to be your first choice, and not just because you are annoyed with Microsoft.  Instead it will be because Microsoft offers a unified app, with both Teams for Work/School and personal Teams kludged together in an unholy mix.  You can try to start a chat with your family but you might suddenly start seeing messages from work since they can see you are active on Teams.  It also means you will have work data on your personal machine, which is a huge no-no!

Zoom will probably see an uptick of users, and depending on your relationship the 45 minute limit could be a good thing or a major annoyance.  It’s too late for BlueJeans, Slack and Discord will be difficult for many to set up and are both needlessly complicated.  WhatsApp will work for those that have accepted Zuckerberg into their lives and Google Meet is still a thing for Gmail users.  Regardless, it’s not going to be fun getting the family used to a new solution, so good luck to you!