Column: Skype shutdown is a sign of how the times are changing

I know what you’re thinking: “Now where will I find an app that takes up space on my phone and I never use it but feel like I can’t delete it in case someone wants to contact me that way?”

It just shows how times have changed. Skype was one of the stars of the internet because it was what we had always dreamed of.

In the 1980s, our sci-fi predicted a world where we could make video calls. Films like Total Recall showed strange cathode-ray screens where we could see the person we were talking to. Skype actually made it happen.

Our sci-fi never predicted those moments where you didn’t realise you were on a video call and showed people a close-up of your ear.

In the early days of Skype, it was revolutionary in letting us chat and see people anywhere around the globe. It also had a tendency to freeze.

That wasn’t all bad. If you were finding a chat dull, you could learn to hold still until your relative hung up.

Skype achieved antimeria, when a brand name becomes a verb. We Google for information, we Hoover the floor and we for a while we would Skype people. It was all going well until the pandemic.

The bosses must have been rubbing their hands together. The globe was entering a stage when millions of people were being told to stay at home and work via the internet.

We all needed a way to stay in touch and no just by voice. We needed to see other humans. But then there was Zoom.

I’d never heard of Zoom at the start of the lockdown. I knew it was a failed Microsoft competitor to the iPod and a villain who fought The Flash, but this new Zoom was some form of video technology.

It was an amazing coup. Thanks to the pub quizzes and online stand-up comedy gigs, we got used to using Zoom. When life emerged and people kept working at home, we stuck with the app we used to get drunk in front of.

When Skype closes, the owners, Microsoft, will push us to use their Teams service instead.

If you have never used that before, it’s basically Zoom but what you’d use when you’re getting told off by human resources.

I kept the Skype app on my phone and in the last few years the only thing I have had on there is spam. Thankfully I can get that everywhere on the web these days.