[HugoTea]

2011: Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion, rebrands Lync to Skype for Business, an incredible branding manoeuvre.

2012: Skype peer-to-peer nature and end-to-end encryption removed.

2017: Microsoft launches Teams, competes with own product after driving Skype into the ground for 6 years with encroaching advertising, removing features, and abandonment.

2025: Skype shut-down.

What was the point? When MS bought Skype, they already held a majority market share in the IM market with MSN, which they also shut-down. Between 2011 and 2025 they lost almost all market share for domestic users to WhatsApp and Discord. This series of events baffles me to no end.

[comrade1234]

If I remember correctly, they had to buy Skype twice because they didn't get everything g in the first transaction. Also, the purchase was backed by the cia through one of their companies (I don't remember if it was palantir though) to remove the end-to-end encryption.

[x0x0]

I think that was ebay. They bought skype but not the p2p tech backing it; fucked the founders on earnouts; the founders refused to reup the contract; ebay was incapable of replacing the tech; and the founders got a bunch of the business back. Presided over by Meg Whitman, who appears to be profoundly incompetent, understanding neither tech nor business.

The contemporary articles are mostly gone, but eg https://archive.is/4tuRg and https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/06/skype-set...

[HugoTea]

Conspiracy or not, it being CIA funded is the most plausible explanation for why they'd make such an expensive purchase and do nothing with it.

[Maken]

Do you remember when they bought the first and largest webmail platform and did nothing with it?

[tonyedgecombe]

I seem to remember they spent years trying and failing to migrate it to .net.

[yesbabyyes]

Not quite--this predates .net. They acquired Hotmail in 1997, while it was running on Solaris mail servers and Apache on FreeBSD for the web frontend. In a highly publicized move, Microsoft ventured to port it to Exchange and IIS on Windows NT. This went on for years on end, with MS claiming to have finished the transition several times, while getting egg on their face. Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000 and a combination of their flagship products and Windows Services for Unix (the WSL of those times).

It has since been rebranded as MSN Hotmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Hotmail, and Outlook, likely with some 365 thrown in.

Meanwhile, they have mismanaged their once great mail user agent Outlook Express, as well as their quite useful personal information manager Microsoft Outlook, to the point where their newest offering is absolutely unusable.

[hulitu]

> Eventually, they got it running on Windows 2000

The legend was that they tried and finally sticked with Freebsd, because Windows was not able to cope with the level of traffic.

[lagniappe]

"eh"

https://www.wired.com/1999/08/hotmail-hackers-we-did-it/