It’s worth taking a moment to remember why Skype was once so groundbreaking.
Most obviously, it offered free voice calls.
International calls used to be expensive, but Skype allowed near real-time, high-quality voice calls for free. That might feel ordinary now, but at the time, it was a small revolution.
What made that possible was its use of P2P communication.
That allowed Skype to reduce infrastructure costs, avoid centralized control or censorship, and enable rich, decentralized interaction—voice, chat, file transfers. As a side effect, latency was low and call quality was good.
Not everything was fully P2P, and many parts of the design were still immature. Its authentication and encryption mechanisms had room for improvement, and there were real security concerns.
Still, what mattered was that it worked.
It actually got used. And the way it spread—so quickly and globally—was a perfect example of network effects in action. It also proved just how deeply information and communication technology can reshape human society.
Later, Skype was acquired by Microsoft, and the architecture changed. The uniqueness of its P2P nature gradually faded. It became a cloud-based, business-oriented service.
Given the demands for security, interoperability, and enterprise compatibility, that shift was probably inevitable—but in the process, Skype lost what had made it truly Skype.
As a product grows, and as disruptive technologies get folded into business structures, trade-offs emerge. Skype showed that whole journey in real time.
Whether people use it today, or whether it’s being absorbed into Teams, is not the point.
Skype had already abandoned its P2P model long ago. But the fact that one of the defining examples of peer-to-peer communication is now vanishing from internet history feels unsettling.
And still, I find it curious that so many of the internet’s most disruptive technologies seem to emerge from Europe. Skype was one of them. It’s an interesting pattern.