Skype and Microsoft

Skype was brilliant. It was end to end encrypted when video chatting with another Skype user and you could send SMS and call phones with cheap rates from it. Then Microsoft bought it and ruined the encryption. Skype was still good for calling cheaply from one country to another. Back in 2009, I bought a Skype feature phone with a "3 Vänner" subscription. At the time I lived in Malmö, spent my days at the Danish Royal Academy of Music in Copenhagen, worked evenings and nights at Kone elevators and freelanced as a baroque cellist, mainly in western and southern Jutland and Scania. Skype and the skype-phone was brilliant to call friends, colleagues and family in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland or anywhere else with my own phone number from anywhere at cheap rates. Most of my fellow musicians also used Skype, so I also chatted in text, voice and video a lot. My parents started using Skype as well, so I could video chat with them from wherever I was.

Gradually, Microsoft did what the American tech giants always do when they buy brilliant (European) companies, which is to ruin their software. They did numerous overhauls of the user interface and every time, it got worse, not better. The amount of bots and scams also skyrocketed under Microsoft's ownership. Microsoft also tried to appeal to a younger crowd by adding stickers and ruin the user interface further. To confuse people, they also used the Skype name for their incompatible Link product which became Skype for business. Microsoft always makes a lot of versions of every product, or uses the same name for a lot of different products, to confuse their users and get businesses to pay more than consumers for the same thing, but with a few bonus features turned on. Market segmentation is their bread and butter, but it is confusing and annoying for their users.

Over time, my use of Skype has decreased with the Microsoftification of the once brilliant Nordic instant messenger, phone and video chat program. A few weeks ago, I found out Microsoft is going to kill this good brand and instead try to get consumers to use Teams which is obviously a business tool not well suited for users of Skype. The video chat in Teams uses the same technology as Skype, so this is probably all about trying to promote the Teams brand and maybe also share the code base between free Teams for consumers and Teams for business which you get with a MS365 subscription.

Skype will stop working on May 5th 2025. My personal Microsoft account only exists because of Skype, so I am now in the process of exporting all my data from Skype and afterwards, I will delete my Microsoft account. If you have a Skype/Microsoft account, it might be a good idea to export your data before it is to late, and if you don't need that account for anything else, you may as well delete it. I have been curious about the free software decentralised platform Matrix for a while, so I think I will see if I can find a Matrix server that is open for new users or set one up myself. I have tried the Matrix app Element in the past, and it was rather good. There is also an Emacs package called ement.el that seemed good when David Wilson of SystemCrafters had a look at it a while back in one of his live streams.