Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis built Skype in 2003, reaching half a billion users in five years. Microsoft bought it for $8.5 billion but stopped developing it to focus on Teams instead. Skype dropped from 500 million users to 40 million as Zoom, WhatsApp, and Google's tools took over.
Skype was the largest communication software of all time, and now it's basically extinct. Well, here's what happened. It all starts in 2003 with these two entrepreneurs, Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. It only takes them 6 months to build the first version of Skype, the first mainstream video call software, and it's stupidly popular. On the first day, they get 10,000 users, and in 5 years they have over half a billion. And tech giant Microsoft is watching. They snap up the software for $8.5 billion to bake it into all of their stuff—Xbox, Outlook, and smartphones. But then they kind of just stopped building it, making the make the mistake that you can't let your product stand still in changing markets, and instead they start building Microsoft Teams, a direct competitor that's now stealing Skype's users. While Microsoft is competing with itself, other companies start building their own versions of Skype, like Zoom, WhatsApp, and Google. So Microsoft's goal to hit a billion daily users is doomed. Today, Teams only gets 300 million users, and Skype is all the way down to just 40 million. Quite the tragedy.
