RIP Skype: how the platform changed the tech and brand world

It was final call for Skype this week, as the brand that was once a household name was finally consigned to the annals of tech history, quietly retired by its owner Microsoft after several years in the twilight zone. But while its passing may have been low key, with few current users to mourn it, the Skype brand leaves behind a remarkable legacy.

In our post-pandemic world, where video calling and remote collaborative working are the norm, it seems hard to remember that there was a time when long distance telephone calls were prohibitively expensive, remote working was difficult or when connecting with colleagues or family on the other side of the world was rare and saved for special occasions. But cast your mind back just a few years to 2003, when Skype was founded, and the world was a very different place.

Skype radically changed human behaviour, bringing far-flung people closer together and paving the way for a more connected world. It enabled the first free international calls with its use of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology and the first low cost calls from the internet to landlines and mobiles. Then came video calls on both desktop and mobile, and, back in 2014, the first interactions of group video calls in a work setting. It pioneered our modern way of remote working, introducing features like screen sharing and the gallery of faces that we now take for granted on video calls. Its legacy lives on, not just in its direct descendant Microsoft Teams, but in a host of other platforms including Zoom, Slack, FaceTime, WhatsApp and many many more.

Quite aside from its pioneering tech, Skype also blazed a trail for other tech startups in terms of its branding. With its friendly logo, distinctive (unforgettable?) sonic branding and slightly quirky, very human expression, the branding was unusual at the time for Silicon Valley. But this, together with a strong brand purpose centered around human connections, played a critical role in helping ordinary people understand the technology it was offering. And it struck a chord with consumers – so much so that, a decade ago, Skype was the generic brand name for the video conferencing category. In terms of brand personality it paved the way for how standout tech brands of today, from Slack to Spotify, communicate with their users.

When Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion in 2011, it also set another precedent – that of the mega tech buyout. While some observers at the time criticised the price tag and called it out as over-valued, what they missed was that Microsoft was acquiring not just Skype’s 160 million user base but also its user-friendly branding (cited at the time by CEO Steve Ballmer) and entrepreneurial culture. It’s a playbook that we’ve seen over and over again in subsequent years, from Meta’s scooping up of Instagram and WhatsApp to Salesforce buying Slack. It changed the course of tech history, and while the branding might not survive, its culture and brand arguably have both stimulated and contributed to the evolution that is Microsoft.

While there are many reasons for Skype’s demise – including the emergence of new tech platforms in the pandemic, the rapid advance of smartphones and the development of Microsoft’s own Teams brand – we’re still absorbing behaviours that were first established by Skype. And Skype’s legacy will also live on in its alumni – who are now all over the world, in companies from Google to Meta, Microsoft to Netflix, Evernote to Zoopla.

For myself, having worked on Skype both at Wolff Olins and on secondment to the company’s Palo Alto offices back in the 2010s, I’m proud to have been part of the team that brought its brand to life. I’d like to think that it’s gone, but not forgotten.

Global Principal, Tom Wason