Is Skype 8.0 going to be the resurrection of the Skype franchise?
The lack of traction for Skype so far during Microsoft’s ownership is rather pitiful.
From being the communications app for most of the world, across both industrialized and emerging nations, Skype has become largely forgotten.
In the interim, WhatsApp has conquered all.
To an outsider like me, the faults came down to a few things: unnecessary tedious onboarding, a hard-to-use UI, a craptastic user experience, and a seemingly user-unfriendly stance from Microsoft. Making international calls, a hallmark of Skype, became a severe chore!
To crown it all, further development on Skype visibly stopped. New features introduced into competing products weren’t even publicly roadmapped!
How bad was it?
Well, WhatsApp went from nowhere to being neck-and-neck with Skype for a minute, and now being in excess of 1 billion global users.
As for Skype, the last time user numbers were made known, it was at 300 million users. Back in 2016.
What makes this more infuriating, is that Microsoft is a well regarded company that is universally trusted to not abuse customer PIIs and data.
In these days of just-1% slightly-greater-than-1% user privacy awareness, I am pretty sure Microsoft can recapture, or at least, capture, a few tens of million new users if they keep their eyes on the prize.
Sadly, I’m not optimistic.
© 2002 – 2018, John Obeto for Blackground Media Unlimited
