So Skype is actually dead now. Not "declining" or "irrelevant," which is what I would've said if you'd asked me about it any time in the last six or seven years — I mean dead, as in Microsoft flipped the switch on May 5th and the app just bounces you toward Teams now. They'd been telegraphing this since February, but seeing the actual login screen redirect still got me more in the gut than I expected.
I want to be honest about something: I hadn't opened Skype in probably four years before this week. Nobody I know has. And yet I spent a solid twenty minutes yesterday scrolling through old blog posts here trying to find the one where I did a Skype interview with a hardware reviewer back in early 2012, maybe three months after I started this blog. The audio was garbage, there was an echo the whole time because he had two laptops open, and I remember apologizing in the post itself for the sound quality. That's a very specific and very 2012 kind of embarrassment.
There used to be "Skype Me!" buttons on the sidebars of basically every personal tech blog, mine included for a while, right next to the RSS icon and the Twitter bird. It was how you signaled you were a real person running a real site and not just a content farm. I genuinely can't remember when I took mine down. Probably around the same time everyone quietly switched to just putting an email address, and then later a contact form, because nobody wanted a random stranger's Skype call popping up at 11pm asking about a product review.
The funny part, and I don't think enough people are pointing this out, is that Microsoft bought Skype in the same year this blog started. That deal closed in October 2011, this blog's first post went up that November, so Skype and techpad have technically had parallel lifespans and only one of us made it. $8.5 billion for a company Microsoft then spent a decade and a half failing to meaningfully integrate into anything, before finally just merging it into Teams, which is the product that killed it in the first place by being the thing everyone's employer forced them onto during the pandemic. There's something almost too neat about that.
What I actually mind, more than the nostalgia stuff, is the way Microsoft is handling the exit. If you want your old chat history, you've got until January 2026 to pull it through their export tool before it's gone for good. Fine, that's a reasonable window on paper. But the actual export process, at least when I tried it on an old account two days ago, dumps everything as a giant zip of JSON files with no images unless you dig through a separate media folder that isn't linked from anywhere obvious. If you were, say, someone who did a decade of client calls or interviews over Skype and want an actual readable archive, you're doing real work to get one. Teams, notably, does not have this problem when it exports your data, because Teams is the product they actually want you to like.
I don't think this changes anything for anyone reading this today. Nobody's workflow breaks. But I do think it's worth ten minutes of your Saturday, if you were blogging or podcasting or doing any kind of remote interviewing between roughly 2008 and 2015, to go dig up whatever's left of your account before that January cutoff actually arrives, because "I'll get to it eventually" is exactly how these archives disappear. I found four old interview recordings in mine I'd completely forgotten existed, one of which is genuinely embarrassing and will not be appearing on this blog, ever, regardless of how many people ask.
Anyway. That weird little chime sound Skype made when someone called you is gone from the world now. I can still hear it perfectly in my head, which is more than I can say for most software from that era.