It should have been an easy win for Microsoft. When coronavirus sent entire offices home, Skype — which for nearly two decades has been the de facto app people use to keep in touch via video — ought to have been the natural choice for businesses to communicate. But soon after lockdown was announced, Skype found itself out of sight, out of mind, replaced by an app half its age: Zoom. What happened?
To understand that, you need to go back to May 2011, when Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion. Back then, WIRED questioned the value of the deal: Microsoft already had VoIP telecommunications software built into its programs, including Windows Live Messenger, and Skype had a fraction of the user base – albeit ones that paid. But the purchase was a way to capture the zeitgeist through the acquisition of a buzzy consumer product. Skype was cool. Heck, Skype was a verb.
But when the buzz didn’t move over, Microsoft doubled down on trying to make it compete with everyday communication apps, while sacrificing the thing that made it most useful: reliable video calling. “They did a redesign of the app and tried to make it a bit more sexy, young and fresh to compete with the WhatsApps and Telegrams of the world,” says Carolina Milanesi, analyst at Creative Strategies. However, by integrating a raft of new features – including “mojis”, Skype’s version of emojis, as well as various features borrowed from Snapchat, the developers lost their way and didn’t focus on the core functionality of making sure the video call quality remained. One much-maligned review of the app in June 2017 saw the average app store rating for Skype drop from 3.5 stars to 1.5 stars.
In response, Skype issued an apologetic blog post. “Sometimes when big companies develop products they just have a bit of feature creep,” explains Om Malik, partner at investment company True Ventures. “They just managed to muck it up all along.” Malik was a massive advocate of Skype until the redesign. “It was so terrible, that was the last time I used Skype. I just got fed up of trying to use that application. The whole thing got convoluted, the interface got worse, and the performance got terrible. It just lost the ease of use it used to have.”
At the same time, alternatives were quietly gaining ground, providing the same features for free and without some of the more tangential trinkets. While Skype stagnated and even regressed, others like Zoom started adding relevant features and firming up the quality of calls to result in fewer dropped lines.
Even Microsoft acknowledged it had problems with Skype. The company launched Teams, a product designed to tackle and take over Slack in workplaces, in November 2016, and began integrating video calls into Teams. At the company’s Ignite conference in September 2017, Microsoft served notice on Skype’s business-focused sideline, saying it would be replaced shortly by Teams. Eighteen months later, it also said Teams would replace the consumer version of Skype. “Microsoft put a lot of energy into creating Teams,” says Romanoff.
By July 2021, Skype will disappear, and anyone wanting to make a business video call through Microsoft products will instead have to use Teams.
Not that people are using either as much as Zoom, which benefited both from being free to download and more reliable than its competitors. (Eric Yuan, Zoom’s founder, has been working on web conferencing software since he arrived in the US in 1997 from China to work for WebEx). An April 2020 survey of 1,110 US companies by Creative Strategies showed that 27 per cent of businesses primarily used Zoom for video calls and meetings, compared to 18 per cent that used Teams, and 15 per cent that used Skype. Many companies had quietly moved over from Skype to Zoom in the intervening years as Skype added more and more features that didn’t fit the core functionality of the service: producing decent quality video calls. And so when coronavirus hit, what in the first half of 2017 would have been a call to download Skype to keep in touch instead became a demand to download Zoom.
“Zoom has become the poster child for video conference, both from a consumer and corporate perspective,” says Milanesi. “If you look at the strength of Skype and Teams combined, they should be the ones having the Zoom moment but they’re not. It’s marketing, and a lot of people think of Skype as yesterday’s video calling.” That’s echoed in the news coverage of video conferencing: according to data compiled by Muck Rack, a website collating journalism produced around the world, between May 2019 and February 2020, Skype consistently led media discussion around video conferencing. But when journalists started having to recommend software to use, they began mentioning Zoom more and more at the expense of Skype and other competitors. In March, Skype was mentioned in 51,000 articles, while Zoom gained mentions in 60,000 stories. By April, Skype remained the same, written about in 50,000 articles, while Zoom was included in 195,000 stories.
Like many changes in society we’ve started to notice as the coronavirus takes hold, the outbreak of the virus wasn’t the cause, but it was a catalyst, increasing what had been a three-year-long shift away from Skype. The need to obtain a reliable video conferencing system at speed meant that people weren’t willing to wait around for Skype, which they knew was already on the way out anyway thanks to Microsoft’s pronouncement that it would shut down. They went straight to Zoom.
“During Covid-19 we made the decision to switch to Zoom from Skype, as it offers us the features we’re looking for,” says Steve Sharp of Fat Cow Media, a London-based branding firm. The reasons were numerous: the company had experienced quality issues with Skype in recent months, which they didn’t encounter on Zoom. They also found that they were increasingly alone in using Skype. “More and more of our clients are using Zoom, which means they already have the platform installed and are ready to go,” he says. “And clients that don’t use Zoom have no issues connecting to the browser version.”
That ability to connect to calls without any friction is also partly why Zoom has succeeded where Skype has failed: many of Zoom’s millions of new users are less tech-literate and simply want something to work – which Skype can no longer guarantee. “That’s what really was one of the great things about Skype. It just worked,” says Malik. “And now Zoom just works. They have security issues and user interface challenges, but compared to everyone else it’s so much easier to use.”
So what will be Skype’s legacy, having gone from the first thing you think of when considering video conferencing to an app that has sat out the biggest potential use case for its product in human history? There will be twin legacies, reckons Romanoff. “From Microsoft’s point of view it’ll be a success; they purchased a niche company and integrated it into Microsoft Office so it’ll have expanded its reach and usage,” he says. But the early adopters of Skype will shake their head at what Microsoft did, he believes. “They took this cool little product and made it corporate.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
