Microsoft pulled the plug on Skype yesterday. I haven’t used it in years. I even took it off of my phone at some point. Even though I was never a particularly heavy user, I still feel a bit of sadness about it.

I first became aware of Skype in (I guess) 2007. A PhD candidate in my department was defending his dissertation, but one of his committee members was from another institution. Instead of flying to West Lafayette for a two hour engagement, they joined in via Skype. As someone who grew up with sub-standard-even-for-dialup dialup Internet, this was pretty wild.

It’s not that I couldn’t conceive of high-bandwidth voice and video communication, it’s just that I hadn’t experienced it before. I didn’t really use it much myself until Mario Marathon, when we’d talk to Internet randos and famous people.

For a while, I used Skype to keep in touch with some of those Internet randos, but my Skype usage really took off when I joined Cycle Computing. When I started in 2013, we were using Skype for voice as well as chat. It was not great. Thankfully, this app called Slack launched in 2014. It didn’t have voice or video chat, so we still used Skype for that (until we switched to Zoom some time later).

By the time Microsoft acquired Cycle (which was well after they acquired Skype), they had developed Teams. My division, though, still used Skype for Business, which wasn’t Skype at all but a re-branded Lync.

From then on, I almost never used Skype. The only person I’ve Skyped with in the last 8 years or so is my wife before we lived together. It’s been years now since I’ve even logged in.

So long, Skype. You could have been awesome, except you were ignored.