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Microsoft closes the Skype video recall service 14 years after the company purchased for $ 8.5 billion, hanging on a pioneer of online communications that raised the communications industry and paved the way for WhatsApp and Zoom.

Seattle -based Microsoft said on Friday that it will retire in service in May and will start transferring customers to the free version of the equivalent teams.

“Skype was an integral part of forming modern communications and supporting countless moments.” Jeff Tiber, head of Microsoft 365 Applications and platforms, said.

Tiber added that the company understood that this step would be difficult for some customers.

Skype was a pioneer in phone and videos via the Internet to anywhere in the world, which is the dawn of the profitable business model in the profitable communications industry to charge the high fees per minute for international calls.

“Skype was a revolutionary product of its time and I will always be proud and grateful to the team members and investors who took us.”

“Now other companies are creating in this field to provide new services to a new generation, and many of them will not have any idea of ​​the cost of communication in Australia.”

Microsoft’s decision to close Skype comes seven years after the issuance of chat and group video calls, which provided many Skype features themselves.

The company has struggled to compete against the two papers including WhatsApp, Telegram and WeChat, while it fell on the side of the road during the Covid-19 pandemic when Zoom’s proverbs managed to take advantage of the prosperity in the demand for video services.

Skype was founded in Luxembourg in 2003 by Zennström and Janus Friis, which led a variety of European developers. Her technology from the world of chaos appeared from the sharing of files from the peer, which was blamed for it for facilitating the piracy of music and deadly films in the early first decade of the twentieth century.

A wave riding from early wide wide range, the startup has attracted tens of millions of users-in addition to competition from large Internet companies including Google.

Skype was obtained by the EBY e -commerce platform for $ 2.6 billion in 2005 in a deal that attracted Silicon Valley agreements for consumers after long waste after the Dotcom statue.

However, two years later, EBay took $ 1.4 billion on investment on the basis that the acquisition was not performed as expected.

In 2009, a consortium bought investors including Andressen Horowitz and Silver Lake the company. After that, Microsoft acquired Skype in 2011 – in the same year as Zoom – in an attempt to restore momentum in Internet business to consumers at a time when a fierce competition from Google.

The former CEO of Microsoft Steve Palmer described 2011 deal As an enormous opportunity for the company to provide services that extend to audio and video calls. He said: “Microsoft and Skype will determine together this future and what it really looks.”

“Skype has benefited from the wide range that walked on the prevailing and noticed a huge demand for free voice calls that had not existed before,” said Benedict Evans, an analyst and technology consultant.

He added, “It was a European story too,” partly because there is a greater demand for the call across the border there is more than America. But today, internet connection has been combined into dozens of applications. “It has become a general technique,” Ivs said.

Microsoft has gradually reduced Skype services since the launch of the teams and Skype has stopped business in 2017.

Late last year, Microsoft said it would prevent customers from adding credits to their accounts, and instead prompted them to use monthly subscriptions.

Skype had more than 36 million users in 2023, when she last reported these numbers, after he decreased from the peak of 300 million in 2016. She acquired work when she had 30 million customers.

Microsoft said it will deport Skype customers to teams that enable them to use their current accreditation data to sign the service. They will also be able to export data including chats, contacts and communication record if they do not want to use the service.

Skype subscription users will be able to use any credits until the end of the next renewal period.