That said, I don't believe that was why Skype lost relevance after Microsoft bought them: Microsoft was seemingly intent on compromising the Skype UX to promote the then-named Windows Live service - and they didn't combat the problems with spam on the service - and the ill-advised and ultimately reversed decision to force-convert Skype accounts into Windows Live accounts in a hamfisted way that left me personally with 3 duplicated accounts and no easy way of managing them - especially after they decreed that Skype will only support 1 account per Windows account in their flagship Windows 8-exclusive client and remove secondary instances from the legacy client, and the list goes on...
...I'd summarise it as them alienating their own fanbase and the tech-thought-leader community, which led to them (us?) seeking different platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Skype quickly becoming irrelevant.
When they relaunched Skype's new desktop client as an Electron app I knew they had stopped caring about it - because they immediately lost all of the advantages of having platform-specific clients, which is especially useful for video-conferencing due to the limitations imposed by Chromium (which are far better now than they were, but still...)
Unpopular opinion: The Skype brand was critical to getting decent uptake in Lync (rebranded as Skype For Business) and these users were migrated across to Microsoft Teams which has been overwhelmingly popular (at least in the UK it’s the de-facto conference app).
It’s not totally clear to me that Microsoft would actually be doing well in the space without the Skype aquisition, but considering they bought Skype for 8.5bn and Zoom now has a market cap of 100bn my assumption is that Teams is valuable and maybe the price was worth paying.
Huh, TIL! I had no idea about that: https://www.iam-media.com/article/648B260AFA518A71125F0E77C3...
That said, I don't believe that was why Skype lost relevance after Microsoft bought them: Microsoft was seemingly intent on compromising the Skype UX to promote the then-named Windows Live service - and they didn't combat the problems with spam on the service - and the ill-advised and ultimately reversed decision to force-convert Skype accounts into Windows Live accounts in a hamfisted way that left me personally with 3 duplicated accounts and no easy way of managing them - especially after they decreed that Skype will only support 1 account per Windows account in their flagship Windows 8-exclusive client and remove secondary instances from the legacy client, and the list goes on...
...I'd summarise it as them alienating their own fanbase and the tech-thought-leader community, which led to them (us?) seeking different platforms like WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger and Skype quickly becoming irrelevant.
When they relaunched Skype's new desktop client as an Electron app I knew they had stopped caring about it - because they immediately lost all of the advantages of having platform-specific clients, which is especially useful for video-conferencing due to the limitations imposed by Chromium (which are far better now than they were, but still...)