No conspiracy neeeded. The simple reasons they bought it was:
1 to buy the users
2 to reign in an upstart empire
3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand
4 to be able to peddle 'Lync'
They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly;
they changed skype from something to chase and desire,
to something to avoid :-/.
A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync,
which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product.
As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'.
It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to.
For a range of years,
the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other..
/s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call..
/s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service
- "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices",
"you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",.
So, skype going from
'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to
'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!'
1 to buy the users
2 to reign in an upstart empire
3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand
4 to be able to peddle 'Lync'
They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly; they changed skype from something to chase and desire, to something to avoid :-/.
A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync, which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product. As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'.
It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to.
For a range of years, the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other..
/s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call..
/s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service
- "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices",
"you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",.
So, skype going from 'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to 'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!'
Enshittification galore.