Skype was first launched back in 2003, and Microsoft acquired it in 2011. A couple of years after that, it discontinued some of its in-house communication products like Windows Live Messenger, and then in 2015, the Redmond firm tried to integrate Skype into Windows 10.
Of course, the Skype road was a bumpy one. That Windows 10 integration lasted about nine months. The company had added separate apps for video calling, messaging, and phone calls and removed them in the very next update. When that update shipped in 2016, it introduced a UWP app as it continued to shift away from Win32, only to kill off UWP and return to Win32.
In 2017, Microsoft launched Teams, a collaboration platform built on the backbone of Skype, designed to compete with the likes of Slack. It’s been pushing Teams pretty hard ever since, so you’d be forgiven if you were expecting Skype to be killed off, say, six years ago when Skype for Business was retired. But just as you’d expect it to happen, some update would ship, and you’d say to yourself, “People are still working on this thing?”
Indeed, Skype wasn’t quite the hit that Microsoft wanted it to be, with the success of Apple’s FaceTime, the failure of the company’s own mobile platform (Windows Phone forever!), and Google launching its endless array of communication services. When Windows 11 first launched in 2021, it shipped with Teams integration, similar to how Windows 10 version 1511 shipped with Skype integration. While that eventually went away as well, the fact that there was a free, personal version of Teams being shipped instead of Skype was a clear sign.
But the time has finally come, as Skype will begin shutting down in May. You’ll likely start seeing the message in the app soon.
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