Microsoft shutting down Skype on May 5th

[SemiLazyGamer]

Microsoft is shutting down Skype

The end of the Skype era.

www.theverge.com

It’s the end of an era. Microsoft is shutting down Skype in May and replacing it with the free version of Microsoft Teams for consumers. Existing Skype users will be able to log in to the Microsoft Teams app and have their message history, group chats, and contacts all automatically available without having to create another account, or they can choose to export their data instead. Microsoft is also phasing out support for calling domestic or international numbers.

 

[Tommy Vercetti]

RIP to a good platform that they made some dumb decisions on.

 

[Quintillus]

I was sad to see this last week. Just the day before they announced it I was Skyping a friend while we caught up and playing Civ VI (the audio quality is better than on Steam chat, plus you can see cats when they walk into the frame with video).

I use Teams at work and it's okay for work (though not nearly as good as Slack), but for personal use with friends? I guess it might work if you ignore the "Teams" part of Teams and only use the "Chat" part, but Skype has a UI built for that. I've got a couple alternatives bookmarked, namely Viber and Talky, but am curious what others' recommendations are for individual catchups via the computer. Yeah, I know there's FaceTime on mobile, but a significant percentage of the people I might want to catch up with use Android, and computer-based solutions are just so much easier from a "able to see things easily" standpoint.

I also have a soft spot for Skype as I used it quite effectively to stay in contact with my family while abroad. It wasn't the only game in town for that even back then, but it was certainly the most convenient.

 

[AvalancheMaster]

One of the great tragedies of our age is all the conversations I've had with highschool friends over Skype being lost to time. Skype has been a shell of its former self for many years now, but it used to be such a great platform that even while in a rapid decline, it took so long for Skype to become irrelevant and straight up bad... and to this day it's not even worse than many other alternatives out there.