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HugoTea | 1 month ago

2011: Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion, rebrands Lync to Skype for Business, an incredible branding manoeuvre.

2012: Skype peer-to-peer nature and end-to-end encryption removed.

2017: Microsoft launches Teams, competes with own product after driving Skype into the ground for 6 years with encroaching advertising, removing features, and abandonment.

2025: Skype shut-down.

What was the point? When MS bought Skype, they already held a majority market share in the IM market with MSN, which they also shut-down. Between 2011 and 2025 they lost almost all market share for domestic users to WhatsApp and Discord. This series of events baffles me to no end.

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comrade1234|1 month ago

If I remember correctly, they had to buy Skype twice because they didn't get everything g in the first transaction. Also, the purchase was backed by the cia through one of their companies (I don't remember if it was palantir though) to remove the end-to-end encryption.

x0x0|1 month ago

I think that was ebay. They bought skype but not the p2p tech backing it; fucked the founders on earnouts; the founders refused to reup the contract; ebay was incapable of replacing the tech; and the founders got a bunch of the business back. Presided over by Meg Whitman, who appears to be profoundly incompetent, understanding neither tech nor business.

The contemporary articles are mostly gone, but eg https://archive.is/4tuRg and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/06/skype-set...

HugoTea|1 month ago

Conspiracy or not, it being CIA funded is the most plausible explanation for why they'd make such an expensive purchase and do nothing with it.