It’s been a year of work-from-home and remotely adjusting to the pandemic work-life - one that is no longer in offices. Tools like video-calling apps, group platforms for work like Slack, Zoom, have become everyday common factors in our life, far from no options when the pandemic started in March 2020. While Zoom calls and Google Meets have become a part of our everyday life now, Skype, the original video-calling platform, invented over a decade before the pandemic isn’t on the list. An opinion piece published in Bloomberg last week titled “How Microsoft Let Skype Lose Out to Zoom" talked about how Zoom “achieved a rare corporate feat: It created a product popular enough to become a common verb. To “Zoom” now means to “chat by video” — in the same way that to “Google” is to search the web. Yet not so long ago, another product’s name stood for videoconferencing: Skype."
Skype has lost the race - and its never-ending start-ups may be a contributing factor in the reason. Even Elon Musk thinks so. Tesla CEO and SpaceX boss, Elon Musk, is often posting memes (sometimes stolen) on the Internet, whenever he’s not moving cryptocurrency markets with his tweets.
The one about Skype shows how Skype is a platform that is notoriously hard to get rid off - even after you uninstall it.
pic.twitter.com/anHPlBpGza— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 6, 2021
Oddly enough, we all relate - especially when Skype launches on start-up, even when you swear you had clicked the ‘Disable on startup’ option the last time it happened.
as I work for level 1 Support, this is ACCURATE AF https://t.co/Idl8Pth1LL— Terry (@Terrytrontron) June 6, 2021
I felt this wholeheartedly https://t.co/kpZDuqiJFN— Ms. Rebel w. a Cause (@Rebellious_Shea) June 6, 2021
😂 I’m glad to see I’m not the only one suffering https://t.co/QFZLMGeYnv— Karabo Morule (@KaraboMorule) June 6, 2021
This is real life. Every freaking time. https://t.co/drN7bNliAL— Geneva Bracken (@GenevaBracken) June 7, 2021
In 2011, when Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion, Zoom had just launched and Skype already had 100 million users. By 2014, Skype was popular enough to merit inclusion as a verb in the Oxford English Dictionary. And by 2015, it had 300 million users.
The Bloomberg opinion further notes that, “But Skype’s technology wasn’t well-suited to mobile devices. When Microsoft set about to address that problem, it introduced a host of reliability nightmares for users. It gave them further headaches by redesigning Skype frequently and haphazardly while integrating messaging and video functions."
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