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That ability to connect to calls without any friction is also partly why Zoom has succeeded where Skype has failed: many of Zoom’s millions of new users are less tech-literate and simply want something to work – which Skype can no longer guarantee. “And clients that don’t use Zoom have no issues connecting to the browser version.” “More and more of our clients are using Zoom, which means they already have the platform installed and are ready to go,” he says. They also found that they were increasingly alone in using Skype. The reasons were numerous: the company had experienced quality issues with Skype in recent months, which they didn’t encounter on Zoom. “During Covid-19 we made the decision to switch to Zoom from Skype, as it offers us the features we’re looking for,” says Steve Sharp of Fat Cow Media, a London-based branding firm. The need to obtain a reliable video conferencing system at speed meant that people weren’t willing to wait around for Skype, which they knew was already on the way out anyway thanks to Microsoft’s pronouncement that it would shut down. Like many changes in society we’ve started to notice as the coronavirus takes hold, the outbreak of the virus wasn’t the cause, but it was a catalyst, increasing what had been a three-year-long shift away from Skype. By April, Skype remained the same, written about in 50,000 articles, while Zoom was included in 195,000 stories. In March, Skype was mentioned in 51,000 articles, while Zoom gained mentions in 60,000 stories.

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But when journalists started having to recommend software to use, they began mentioning Zoom more and more at the expense of Skype and other competitors. It’s marketing, and a lot of people think of Skype as yesterday’s video calling.” That’s echoed in the news coverage of video conferencing: according to data compiled by Muck Rack, a website collating journalism produced around the world, between May 2019 and February 2020, Skype consistently led media discussion around video conferencing. “If you look at the strength of Skype and Teams combined, they should be the ones having the Zoom moment but they’re not. “Zoom has become the poster child for video conference, both from a consumer and corporate perspective,” says Milanesi.

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And so when coronavirus hit, what in the first half of 2017 would have been a call to download Skype to keep in touch instead became a demand to download Zoom. Many companies had quietly moved over from Skype to Zoom in the intervening years as Skype added more and more features that didn’t fit the core functionality of the service: producing decent quality video calls. An April 2020 survey of 1,110 US companies by Creative Strategies showed that 27 per cent of businesses primarily used Zoom for video calls and meetings, compared to 18 per cent that used Teams, and 15 per cent that used Skype. (Eric Yuan, Zoom’s founder, has been working on web conferencing software since he arrived in the US in 1997 from China to work for WebEx).

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Not that people are using either as much as Zoom, which benefited both from being free to download and more reliable than its competitors. “Microsoft put a lot of energy into creating Teams,” says Romanoff.īy July 2021, Skype will disappear, and anyone wanting to make a business video call through Microsoft products will instead have to use Teams. Eighteen months later, it also said Teams would replace the consumer version of Skype. At the company’s Ignite conference in September 2017, Microsoft served notice on Skype’s business-focused sideline, saying it would be replaced shortly by Teams. The company launched Teams, a product designed to tackle and take over Slack in workplaces, in November 2016, and began integrating video calls into Teams. Even Microsoft acknowledged it had problems with Skype.