In the early 2000s, calling was really expensive due to the server cost.
In 2003, two techie friends, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, decided to solve it using peer-to-peer (P2P) connections.
And that's how Skype was born.
The service exploded, and in just 3 years, Skype had 115 million users!
Around that time, eBay wanted an in-house platform to connect buyers and sellers; hence, it bought it for a whopping $2.6B.
But due to some internal issues, eBay couldn't run Skype, and later in 2011, Microsoft bought out Skype for $8.5 billion!
But here's the twist:
1. The P2P tech that once made Skype shine didn’t play nicely with mobile.
Leading to frustrated users!
📍2. The worst part?
Microsoft itself launched Teams—that led to the final death of Skype!
Everything Microsoft learned from Skype was used to improve Microsoft Teams.
And what happened to Skype?
Well, Skype was left to die by Microsoft, who bought it!
This post was originally shared by on Linkedin.