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Microsoft wants to ally itself with Europe: What's behind the billion-dollar investment?
by Florian Bodoky
Microsoft discontinues Skype
5.5.2025
Translation: machine translated
After almost 22 years, Skype is coming to an end. Microsoft will officially discontinue the service on 5 May 2025.
As Microsoft announced back in February 2025, «Skyping» is now a thing of the past. This is despite the fact that the instant messaging service successfully conquered the world under several owners from August 2003. At its peak - in the early 2010s - it had over 300 million monthly users.
Billion-dollar deals that have made some people filthy rich
The service was created by a team of Estonian programmers on behalf of a Danish and a Swedish developer. More precisely, by the founders of Skype Technologies, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström.
In 2005, the two became filthy rich in one fell swoop - Skype was sold to eBay for 2.6 billion US dollars. Four years later, 65 per cent of the company shares worth USD 1.9 billion went to the investor group Silver Lake Partners. Just two years later - at the beginning of 2011 - Facebook, Google and Microsoft expressed interest in a takeover. Microsoft ultimately won the bid and paid a whopping USD 8.5 billion.
The decline of Skype is also the rise of Teams
In addition to the fact that Skype made a few people extremely wealthy, the free video calls in particular were a major revolution for the masses. However, after the takeover by Microsoft, the wind changed and Skype gradually lost ground. Market share was lost to external competitors such as FaceTime, GoogleMeet and Zoom. From 2017, internal competitors - Microsoft Teams - also stole Skype's thunder. Before it was shut down, Skype still had around 8.6 million active users per month. Microsoft Teams has now reached 320 million.
In retrospect, Skype probably had to die so that Teams could become big.
Requiescat in pace, Skype.
Header image: Shutterstock
Martin Jud
Senior Editor
martin.jud@digitecgalaxus.chI find my muse in everything. When I don’t, I draw inspiration from daydreaming. After all, if you dream, you don’t sleep through life.
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