"Let's Skype" – the beginning of the messenger age

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Making free calls over the Internet – is a simple but unprecedentedly successful idea, at least if you ignore the cost of an Internet connection, which you needed anyway shortly after the turn of the millennium. That was the idea behind Skype, which was launched in 2003. Skype then passed through several hands. In May 2025, the current owner Microsoft plans to discontinue the service and migrate users to Teams.

This means that the idea of peer-to-peer conversations will be a thing of the past; from then on, everything will run via Microsoft's servers. The supposedly direct connection, and even more so the effortless handling, have always been the basis for Skype's success. Initially, the focus was on telephony, but Skype quickly became video-capable, and this also led to a breakthrough in the private sphere: contact with distant relatives became uncomplicated and much more personal. And Skype was cheaper than expensive telephone connections, especially when going abroad or overseas.

The success of Skype cannot be explained without the technological and social environment of the first years of the 21st century. Smartphones, today the standard device for all communication, were still expensive toys for professionals and nerds. Mobile phone tariffs were even pricier than they are today, bandwidths were limited and meaningful video or even group conferencing was still unthinkable. A breakthrough like the iPhone, which came onto the market in 2007, was not in sight.

The PC as a universal communication device

PCs, on the other hand, were ubiquitous in both professional and private environments, mainly in desktop form. At home, reasonably broadband (DSL) connections made surfing and gaming part of everyday life. However, there was a lack of communication, with gamers relying on clumsy solutions such as Teamspeak and chat programs such as ICQ, which had also recently been discontinued. What was missing was the one program – not yet called an "app" at the time – that combined voice, chat, screen sharing and file transfer. And that simply worked. That was Skype.

Whether you wanted to make a quick call to a business contact in the USA at the office without high telephone charges, or explain a program to mom in the evening – Keyword: screen sharing – Skype could do it all. No major configuration was necessary, Skype mainly relied on the ports for web applications. Incidentally, this also made it vulnerable if the IP address of a Skype user was discovered. This became a problem for the first gamers enthusiastic about Skype in the 2010s, but less of a problem for employees behind a good company firewall.

Combining telephone and PC communication

Apart from such errors, the contact list with names was also impressive, as you could create it yourself. Skype was not tied to a mobile phone number, as is the case today with Telegram, for example. You could have as many accounts as there were email addresses available. The "Skype phonebook" soon became as important as well-maintained email addresses. It was also clever that you could call phone numbers directly with a credit – which Microsoft has of course also recently abolished –, Skype operated many gateways to the landline network. The peer pressure that is common today ("Don't you have WhatsApp?") was not even necessary. A cheap cable headset was enough to make calls with Skype on the PC. You only needed a webcam for video chats, and webcams probably got a big boost from Skype in particular, perhaps also for very private 1-to-1 conferences between adults.

Skype was a kind of killer app for a category of hardware that is almost forgotten today, namely netbooks. These mini laptops, which are very cheap compared to large notebooks, have enjoyed a period of around four years of great popularity since the Eee PC from Asus, released in 2007. Thanks to their built-in webcams, it was easy to hold video conferences at public Wi-Fi hotspots – back then, by the way, with headphones, not in the supermarket with hands-free WhatsApp, as is often the case today. The verb "skype" established itself as a synonym for video telephony.

Smartphone messengers have replaced Skype

However, Skype did not make the leap to smartphones, where WhatsApp, Signal and co. were ubiquitous. Perhaps because they were able to establish themselves as a text message replacement at a time when 2G/3G bandwidths were still too low for video calls, perhaps because Skype simply missed out on the transformation. In any case, Messenger offers everything in your pocket that Skype could do on a PC 20 years ago.

And so perhaps it's time for the pioneer to step down. Since its takeover of Skype in 2011, Microsoft has clearly not managed to build a business model on it, even though it made a halfway serious attempt with "Skype for Business". With Teams, the company also created competition in-house. Just as users are being pushed from Windows 10 to Windows 11 without any great technical need, the megacorporation now only wants to maintain one platform.

Still, it's a shame. Like many others, the author of this text will now have to see how he can get contacts that have only existed on Skype for over a decade onto another platform. In my case, however, this will probably not be Teams for the most part. Signal's simple structure and fairly good sense of security make it easier to communicate without Microsoft behind you, and it also works well on the PC. Even group conferences, which used to be a unique selling point of Skype, now work quite well with it, and there is plenty of competition from Zoom, Jitsi and others. Let's see how long "skype" will remain in the dictionary.

(nie)