It may be difficult to believe in this time of Zoom, Google Meet, and Slack, but at one point, Skype was one of the primary ways to make contact with friends, family, and colleagues. First released in 2003 and, after going through several owners, finally purchased by Microsoft in 2011, the app allowed you to not only speak with other Skype users, but to make phone calls (and eventually video calls) over the internet. For its time, it was a real innovation and a major convenience.
Unfortunately, the once-popular app was fated to be neglected and ignored, its potential never fulfilled. And it has finally reached its end. Last February, Microsoft announced that it was shutting Skype down on May 5th. Those still using Skype were encouraged to move to Teams or to export their data. But although Skype is now gone, the memories it evokes — not to mention the sound of its weird and wonderful ringtone — will stay with many of us for years to come.
Here are some thoughts from The Verge’s staff on Skype’s passing.
“Skype was my lifeline back home.”
In 2006, I was 18 and did a thing only brash teenagers could do: I left the country on my own to live in Japan for seven years. This was before smartphones, when you had to have international calling cards, and my family had only gotten high-speed internet access the year before. On the one hand, I was excited about an adventure in a place where I knew no one and wasn’t fluent in the local language. On the other hand, I was petrified.
Skype was my lifeline back home. All of my high school friends were on it, and it was cheaper than calling my family with expensive international minutes. The call quality wasn’t always great, and the time difference between Tokyo and New York City was tough. But in those early days, it was comforting to set up Skype dates with people who I knew loved me. That distinctive Skype ringtone was a reminder that I could always go home if I wanted to. Nearly a decade later, when my dad had to leave the US to receive more affordable medical treatment in Korea, Skype was the only video chat software he knew how to use. It became the main way I could see him for several months before his health declined.
Eventually, we all moved on to other chat and video apps. My Japanese friends all use LINE, and my Korean family all uses KakaoTalk. FaceTime, Zoom, and Google Meet pretty much cover the rest of my friends. I haven’t thought of Skype in a hot second. But now that it’s going away, I am grateful it was there for me during some of the hardest moments of my life. – Victoria Song, senior reviewer
“Those long-distance calls were expensive if you didn’t use Skype”
Remember the first iPhone? No, not that one. Infogear sold products under the name beginning in 1998. It was acquired by Cisco, which later sold Linksys-branded iPhones. (Yes, there was a lawsuit over it.) I remember reviewing the Linksys iPhone CIT400 — otherwise known as a “Skype phone” — in 2007.
Although there were a couple of competitors, it was relatively unique at the time since it allowed you to use Skype to place voice calls like you would on a normal household phone (remember those?). It was useful because my girlfriend (now wife) was living in Italy. And those long-distance calls were expensive if you didn’t use Skype! – Todd Haselton, deputy editor
“It became a cherished lifeline”
I actually avoided Skype right up until a few years before its demise. I don’t remember it being a popular “thing” in the UK when I was growing up. When I started jobs that required me to make overseas calls, however, it became a cherished lifeline. My mobile carrier outright blocked me from dialing non-UK numbers, and every attempt to correct the issue fizzled out. Instead, I found it was easier and cheaper to just download Skype and use credits when I needed to make those calls. It was good while it lasted :’-( – Jess Weatherbed, news writer
“We were using Skype for a lot of our productions”
When I first started producing podcasts at The Verge in 2015, we were using Skype for a lot of our productions. Before each taping of our show Ctrl-Walt-Delete, I’d sit in our VO booth on Skype with veteran tech journalist Walt Mossberg in DC to make sure his Blue Yeti microphone was still operating with the software.
For our show Verge ESP, I remember having to buy Skype credits to call the phone numbers of guests who didn’t have / want to use a Skype account.
When The Vergecast was live on YouTube every Thursday, we used Skype’s NDI (Network Device Interface) to bring remote guests onto the show, which was the best software for our needs in the live control room at the time.
However, once Zoom took over, that was the end of using the buggy Skype software. – Andru Marino, senior producer
“If a writer couldn’t get to the studio … Skype worked”
For decades now, my partner Jim Freund has been the host of a radio show called Hour of the Wolf on listener-sponsored NYC station WBAI-FM. He talks about science fiction and fantasy, and over the years, he has interviewed a lot of authors.
For many of those years, if a writer couldn’t get to the studio to talk and read from their work, Skype worked. It was easy to use — the most tech-nervous author could be talked through the downloading and registering process — and the quality of the resulting recording was better than you’d get over a phone. And if the writer was overseas, the cost wasn’t as prohibitive as if you’d used the landline.
But as time went on, Skype didn’t keep up. When Microsoft bought it in 2011, Jim was hopeful that this would mean better quality calls and more features — in other words, increased product support and development. However, Skype was, for the most part, ignored. As a result, especially with the increased popularity of Zoom and other apps, it became pretty much forgotten.
For the last few years, if a guest had trouble installing or understanding the video / podcasting software that Jim used and he suggested, “Well, we could use Skype instead,” the answer was often, “Skype? What’s that?” That was a true sign that Skype had become a thing of the past. – Barbara Krasnoff, reviews editor
“I listened to that ringtone so many times…”
In 2015, I did a deep dive on Skype’s entire soundscape as it was being redesigned under Microsoft:
“All the actual components [were] recorded organic sounds like wind, water, pops, people’s voices,” says [Steve] Pearce. Wind, he says, provided the white noise in a notification. A bubble pop could be recorded from a ketchup bottle, a glass, or a human gasp or gulp. “We don’t like technical things, even though we are a technical company,” he adds.
“If you actually ask people to hum or sing the Skype ringtone, they can’t.”
Ironically, I listened to that ringtone so many times that, almost 10 years later, “doo dee doo, dee doo dee” popped into my head immediately. – Adi Robertson, senior editor, tech and policy
DOO DEE DOO — DEE DOO DEE. – Jay Peters, news editor
