Goodbye to Skype, Microsoft closes the application after more than 20 years

The technology company Microsoft definitively shut down the text and voice messaging application Skype this Monday after more than 20 years of operation.

As announced last February, the platform will stop working from this May 5, but users will have more than two months to decide whether they want to switch to Microsoft Teams or simply export their history.

Since Microsoft bet on the free version of Teams, which has practically the same functions as Skype, to take over.

Users, as announced by the technology company, will be able to log in to Teams with their existing credentials and the contacts and chats will be directly transferred to the application.

With this change, Microsoft will eliminate the telephony parts that allow you to call ‘normal’ national or international phone numbers; a Skype feature that gained popularity in the early 2000s, as it allowed users to talk without paying a phone company.

However, this function began to lose popularity with the arrival of smartphones and applications like FaceTime or WhatsApp.

In addition, during the pandemic, consumers chose to use other applications, such as Zoom, to make video conferences, instead of Skype.

The messaging application that is saying goodbye today was born on August 29, 2003, in Tallinn (Estonia), but its journey with Microsoft began in 2011, when it was bought for 8.5 billion dollars.

“We’ve learned a lot from Skype over the years (and that information) we’ve applied to Teams as we’ve evolved teams over the last seven or eight years,” said Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms for Microsoft 365, in an interview with CNBC.

But he added: “We feel that now is the time because we can be simpler for the market, for our customer base, and we can offer more innovation faster simply by focusing on Teams.”