Microsoft.
Sometimes a product winds up in late-stage enshittification before its sector is fully developed. Just as the thing it does is beginning to fully explode, it begins to aggressively harvest its brand value. They miss the big wave, and everyone asks what happened. That’s one disadvantage in moving early. You also hit enshittification early.
Answer: Microsoft bought it.
Having centralized authentication servers. Otherwise MS purchase of it wouldn’t kill the normal Skype, and by now it’d be probably, like ship of Theseus, actualized for modern security and other requirements. Like X-Wing Alliance and WoW and Warcraft III modding, and other iconic games getting even replacement engines.
Hotline got FOSS clients at some point, some still work, some people even make new ones.
It was hogging port 80.
So it can bypass shitty firewall setups.
Complete and utter disregard for their Linux community and their reliability when they swapped off p2p and onto cloud based infrastructure was a pretty big one. It was crashing multiple times a day during that stage.
Microsoft
Cant read the article due to paywall, but, nothing “went wrong” with skype, it was and has always been utter trash. Just having your username leaked was a security breach. Skype’s only merit was it was the first easy to use video calling platform that combined text, audio and streaming in one.
Theres a reason why it was so easy to move my friends group off skype to discord right when discord launched, but I havent been able to convince that same group to move from discord.
Cant read the article due to paywall
Woah, when did The Verge have a paywall?
This essentially. It was an easy voice and more importantly videocall software that was free. There were alternatives for text (ICQ, AIM) which were nice and everyone had them, and voice (Teamspeak, Mumble) which were either not free or you had to host them yourself and neither did Videocalls. So you begrugingly had a skype account too.
Wasn’t Skype the best audio/video protocol at the time? Everything else around it was terrible, but I remember that skype was the only voice call software that worked well for me on shitty connection back in the day.
My memory says that both vent and teamspeak were way better for audio, but this was also a time where no one had a mic remotely close to the average you get today. Video, yes. But skype was really buggy and often did not even work
But skype was really buggy and often did not even work
Could you please specify the time of such assessment? Because somewhere between 2009 and 2012 Skype seemed flawless for me (of course, with ICQ before it I just didn’t know what’s reliable offline messages and message history, so there’s that).
Voice calls worked well enough over like 45kbps. Leaving space for online game traffic (I think it was something like Burden of Crown over Hamachi, not too demanding). Of course my memory might make the experience cooler than it really was.
Skype had very good architecture and compared to things popular today was more usable.
It also worked with unbelievably bad connectivity.
Security-wise - advanced Linux users would run Skype under a different user, so that it couldn’t access their home directory. A weird decision to be honest, since an X11 client can make full screen captures and observe keypresses all the same. Security theater is sometimes just a hobby.
Microsoft rep: “I believe you are referring to Teams.”
It was bought by microsoft, that’s what went wrong.
Yeah anyone who used Skype at the time immediately knew what went wrong
Sure, but Skype was shit even before that. It had great potential though, could have become another whatsapp.
Microsoft is the EA of the Software world. It’s where companies and ideas go to die.
Google: “Am I a joke to you??”
Exactly.
Skype felt heavy, no matter the spec of the computer it felt bloated and sluggish. I’m not trading thr article, but teams is and discord took Skype outback had their way and threw Skype in a dumpster when they were done.
I moved in with my online girlfriend and no longer needed it.
While we are at it, what went wrong with Twitter too? Have you guys noticed Twitter kind of sucks lately?
What are you, some kind of communist woke globalist radical?