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Skype is not what it used to be. You may or may not have noticed.
The voice, video, and messaging app became a hit in the 2000s by allowing people to talk to friends and family members without paying the long-distance fee. in 2005 ebay I bought it. This deal did not work out as planned, and a majority stake was bought by a group of investors led by Silver Lake. Microsoft Then it stepped in, paying $8.5 billion for the company in 2011.
Even being backed by the largest software company in the world, Skype is falling by the wayside. During the pandemic, consumers and business workers have turned to tools like Zoom in And meta WhatsApp, and now there are any number of options to quickly communicate with groups of friends and colleagues via smartphones.
“Skype is still seen primarily as a one-to-one,” Jim Gaynor, vice president of research at consulting firm Directions on Microsoft, said in an interview with CNBC.
Microsoft popularized Skype in Outlook and Windows and even enriched the application with it Generative AI chatbot from Bing. But the numbers still don’t look great.
In March 2020, Microsoft said Skype had 40 million daily active users, a number that has since fallen to 36 million, according to a spokesperson. By contrast, Microsoft’s newest Teams communications app is growing in popularity, rising from nearly 250 million monthly users in July 2021 to a record number of more than 300 million in the first quarter.
Jan Tallinn, one of Skype’s founding engineers, said that although it’s been more than a decade since he left Skype, it’s still his default option for making calls.
“If people want to use another channel, I’m happy to comply,” he said.
It’s not clear how long Skype will be around, but it hasn’t moved anywhere just yet.
“Skype will continue to be a great choice for people who love it and want to connect through messaging, voice and video calls, and Bing chat,” a Microsoft spokesperson wrote in an email.
Watch the CNBC digital video above to learn more about the growth and struggles of the 20-year-old Skype.
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