Skype was Microsoft’s biggest-ever acquisition in 2011, a deal brokered by former CEO Steve Ballmer when the company was trying to compete with the rise of the iPhone. But after spending $8.5 billion on Skype, Microsoft dropped the ball again and again over the past 14 years, to the point where Skype was so irrelevant during a global pandemic that everyone used Zoom instead.

Skype has been relegated to a forgotten relic of an era before Google and Apple’s mobile dominance, and Microsoft is now laying it to rest alongside other failed mobile efforts like Windows Phone. It wasn’t always this way, though.

In early 2012, a few months after Microsoft’s acquisition, I visited the Skype offices in Stockholm that engineers had just moved into. Skype had just passed 41 million concurrent users, more than even Steam’s recent record. Skype was so popular at the time that people kept stealing the Skype signs outside its offices, so the company simply stopped replacing them.

Inside the Skype Stockholm office, I met engineers who were excited and nervous about Microsoft’s acquisition, but who had been reassured by a visit from Ballmer, who shook their hands and promised that Micr …

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