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The next chapter: Moving from Skype to Microsoft Teams:
[...] In order to streamline our free consumer communications offerings so we can more easily adapt to customer needs, we will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams (free), our modern communications and collaboration hub.
With Teams, users have access to many of the same core features they use in Skype, such as one-on-one calls and group calls, messaging, and file sharing. Additionally, Teams offers enhanced features like hosting meetings, managing calendars, and building and joining communities for free.
[...] During this transition period, users have a choice:
1. Move to Microsoft Teams for free. Over the coming days, we will roll out the ability for Skype users to sign into Teams (free) on any supported device using their Skype credentials—starting today with those who are part of both the Teams and Skype Insider programs. By logging in to Teams with a Skype account, chats and contacts will automatically appear in the app so you can quickly pick up where you left off.
During the transition period, Teams users can call and chat with Skype users and Skype users can do the same with Teams users. This helps ensure you can stay connected with everyone, regardless of the platform you're using during this transition.
2. Export your Skype data. If you prefer not to migrate to Teams, you can instead export your data including chats, contacts, and call history.
Skype will remain available until May 5, 2025, giving users time to explore Teams and decide on the option that works best for them.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday March 04 2025, @11:03PM (1 child)
Everything MS, across the board, seems to be the K-mart of its marketplace.
People who want the most fashionable and stylish stuff regardless of expense buy Apple. If you want to actually get stuff done, they sign up with Google. There's the hipster boutique shoppers for 3rd parties. The DIYers set up Linux stuff and host their own. Finally everything MS is hated by its own users but its cheaper so they're "stuck" with it, and everything is kind of half ass and brittle and doesn't work that well but it kind of limps on.
The only possible exception I can think of is Azure, which is actually pretty good stuff but insanely overpriced, its the "Apple" of cloud. "Hi I'd like something like AWS except that it integrates deeply and perfectly with the rest of the MS ecosystem and I don't mind if it costs 10x as much". Some of the SaaS is even more, price out a MSSQL instance for fun experimentation sometime (its about a car payment per month, last time I checked).
(Score: 2) by Unixnut on Wednesday March 05 2025, @10:14PM
That is the "Hook them young, then milk them later" business practice. When you are a small start up MS will offer you their entire suite of software (desktop, server, AD, the whole lot) as a site licence for very little money. Unless you are explicitly interested in Unix technology as a company then MS deal is usually the best offer you will get to start your business up.
It works very well, you get MS Server, AD, Outlook, Windows Desktops, MSSQL and other dev tools, all together, and you can concentrate on growing your business.
However this makes you dependent on their ecosystem, and if your company grows and becomes successful over a decade or more, eventually the size will reach a point where the above offer no longer qualifies. Then MS will really hit you with licencing costs. MS stuff suddenly costs 10x the competition, but you (and MS) know that it would cost you 50x that to re-write all your legacy stuff to move off the MS ecosystem, so you pay the 10x going rate.
It happened at a previous start-up I worked for. MS offered their ecosystem on really good rates when they were starting out, but 15 years later the licencing costs hit, and we paid them because it would have taken years and magnitudes more money to re-write 15 years of everything being dependent on MS tooling.
We used and paid for Azure because of Azure AD, which tied in to MS AD, which tied into the e-mail, the desktops, the SSO, everything. Ripping all that out would have halted the business and cost huge amounts of money, for a result that to the end users works exactly the same as before.
It is a captive audience, and MS has been doing this for decades, it is their "cash cow" income stream that has been a good earner for them every since.