For years, Skype had almost total market dominance. If you wanted to video call someone, you were going to use Skype. By the time a small competitor called Zoom was founded in 2011, Skype had used its 8-year head start to grow to over 100 million users. Hell, it had even become so big that in the same year The Onion joked that “Skype” would be added to the dictionary and three years later, the verb was added to the Oxford English Dictionary. You know you’ve made it when you’ve become a verb.
All that Skype needed for world domination was for more people to use video calls as part of their daily life. And yet 18 months after a pandemic forced the whole world online and to use video calls for all elements of our lives, the end of July will see “Skype for Business” being discontinued, with Skype’s market share down to 6.6%.
Skype’s lack of competition during its period of dominance led to complacency, stagnation, and pointless and poorly rolled out updates. When the world went online and Skype realised that it was no longer the only gig in town and that it was behind the pack, it was too late to do anything. What should have been the period for the company’s ultimate success was its time of crisis and demise.
