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Microsoft closes his Skype video for 14 years after buying a company for $ 8.5 billion, hanging at the pioneers of the internet communications that raised the telecommunications industry and opened the way WhatsApp and Zoom.
Microsoft, based in Seattl, said on Friday that he would use in May and will start moving customers to a free version of his equivalent team app.
“Skype was an integral part of shaping modern communication and supporting countless significant moments.” said Jeff Teper, president of the Microsoft 365 app and platforms.
Teper added that the company realized that the move would be challenging for some customers.
Skype was a pioneer in sending a phone and video calling online on any part of the world, an innovation that has blown the lucrative telecommunication industry business model in the collection of high fees per minute for international calls.
“Skype was a revolutionary product of his time and I will always be proud and grateful for the wound members of the team and investors who took the opportunity for us,” said his co -founder Niklas Zennström, launched by European technological investor atomico.
“Now other companies are innovating in this area to offer new services for the whole new generation, many of which will have no idea how expensive it was to call Australia.”
Microsoft’s decision to close Skype comes seven years after posting his teams for chat and a group video call app, which offered many of the same features as Skype.
The job struggled to compete against advancement, including WhatsApp, Telegram and Wechat, while it fell on a trip during the Coid-19 pandemia when the ZOOM characters were able to use a flourishing for demand for video confession services.
Skype was founded in Luxembourg in 2003 by Zennström and Janus Friis, who led a diverse group of European developers. His technology was created from the chaotic world of splitting the Peer-Per-PEER files, for which he was blamed in the early 2000s to facilitate the angry piracy of music and movies.
By driving a wave of early adoption of a broadband network, Start-up quickly attracted tens of millions of users-like a competition of larger internet companies, including Google.
Skype bought an ebay Ebay platform for $ 2.6 billion in 2005 in an agreement overwhelmed by the Silicon Valley Blockbuster Agreement for consumerial companies after a long hangover after the dotcom bust.
Two years later, however, Ebay took investments in the amount of $ 1.4 billion on investment on the basis that the acquisition did not execute as expected.
2009, a consortium of an investor, including Andreessen Horowitz and Silver Lake, bought a company. Then Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 – the same year that Zoom was founded – in an effort to regain the momentum in the web business of consumers at the time he faced Google’s competition.
Microsoft’s former CEO Steve Ballmer described 2011 As a “huge opportunity” for the company in providing services to the coverage of voice and video calls. “Microsoft and Skype will define this future together and how it really looks,” he said.
“Skype used the mainstream broadband networks and unlocked a huge request for free voice calls that have never existed before,” said Benedict Evans, a technological analyst and advisor.
“It was a European story too,” he added in part because there was a greater demand for cross -border calls than in America. But today the internet call is integrated into dozens of apps. “It became generic technology,” Evans said.
Microsoft progressively reduced Skype services from the launch of teams and interrupted Skype for business in 2017.
At the end of last year, Microsoft said he would stop the customers so they could add loans to their accounts instead of pushing them to use monthly subscriptions.
Skype had more than 36 mn users in 2023, when he last reported these figures after falling from a peak of 300 mn in 2016. He got a job when he had 30 million customers.
Microsoft said he would migrate the Skype customers to teams that allow them to use their current credentials to sign up for a service. They will also be able to export data, including chats, contacts and history history if they do not want to use the service.
Skype -s paid subscription users will be able to use any loan by the end of the next renovation period.
