What Happened to Skype?

Skype used to be one of the most used video calling platforms in the world, but now they’re kind of left as an afterthought, so what happened?

In 2003 two guys from Europe named Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, though of this P2P (peer-to-peer) system where users provide their computer and bandwidth. So they called their company Skype which stands for “sky peer to peer”. They launch a beta in 2003 and it was a big hit due to network effects which is where the usefulness of a product broadens as users spread the news about it. Just two years after the launch, eBay decided to buy skype for 2.6 billion dollars with the idea that customers and sellers would be able to talk, but not really anyone would want to do that. Six years later in 2011, eBay sold Skype to Microsoft for eight and a half billion dollars. Microsoft did use skype for a bit, but they later did end up releasing Microsoft Teams to kind of replace it. In 2021, Microsoft discontinued Skype for business leaving no other alternative than to switch to Microsoft Teams if you wanted to stay inside the Microsoft ecosystem