this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Wait.....MICROSOFT owns skype??? Was this always the case, or did they do something stupid where they bought skype during the heyday, and immediately tank it just a few years before the pandemic? Because Zoom really had a field day in 2020.
So, which is it? Did they always own it, or were they a buyer of an established skype that tanked it like Verizon did with tumblr? Or that other company did with myspace?
If I remember correctly MS bought it from eBay. And then promptly did their best job at taking a dump on it. Nothing MS did to Skype was good, disabled encryption by default, removed features, made the network so terrible that they actually make you consider teams. At one point Skype was the only game in town for personal web calls and chats, in the US at least. MS pissed that away, because killing competition and owning patents is more lucrative than creating good products and services.
Also forced people to use a Microsoft account to use it, and they definitely messed something up in the migration.
The biggest thing they did to kill it was banner ads in the client. The second those showed up, all my friends and myself instantly jumped to the new, fledgling Discord.
Which very quickly started to add the occasional banner and constantly push nitro. It fucking sucks.
Is there a defederated version which doesn't constantly drop quality and connection like discord does?
Matrix
They've owned it since 2011. When they did buy it, they had Lync, which sucked pretty bad. Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.
And the resulting horror show is just as bad as you'd imagine to :/
It's the second one.
https://youtu.be/ZI0w_pwZY3E
I remember a theory that the US government asked Microsoft to purchase Skype and change it from p2p to server-based, so that they could intercept decrypted communications.
Skype was originally made by a European company (Latvian?).
Ya know, as far as conspiracy theories go, this isn't hard to believe might be true. I could see that. I mean, I don't know either way what the truth is, but it's not like you're saying the moonlanding was actually first done by bigfoot, and it's kept under wraps to promote the cold war. See the difference is, I actually DO know about the bigfoot one. That's real. That happened. The government lies about bigfoot on the moon!
My father, who worked for a huge computer manufacturer, was one approached by two young dudes asking for a server for their new startup. He listened to their proposition but couldn't see how they were going to stay in business, so he turned them down and they went elsewhere for their hardware.
This was the two founders of Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, some 20 years ago.
Your dad after hearing Skype will shut down: "FINALLY!!! This nightmare can finally end."
Buyer. 🤡
Where the fuck were you in 2011?