Microsoft paid $8.5 billion for Skype, then spent over a decade sabotaging it

A retrospective on Microsoft's $8.5 billion acquisition of Skype in 2011 and how the company systematically failed to leverage it. After killing off Windows Live Messenger, Microsoft never meaningfully integrated Skype into its ecosystem, failed to respond to competitors like Discord, and eventually launched Teams for personal use — a product that was nearly unusable for years. The piece argues Microsoft's pattern of acquiring competitors rather than investing in its own products, then letting those acquisitions stagnate, led to Skype's inevitable shutdown. Teams is seen as an inadequate replacement that will never achieve the cultural relevance Skype once had.