Now that Skype has been killed Flashback on how some of the fall...

44 views May 06, 2025 ~2 min read

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Now that Skype has been killed

Flashback on how some of the fall might have been self-inflicted

When I worked there 2012-14 (already owned by MSFT) never saw any numbers shared to devs on usage (DAU, MAU), revenue... nothing. Every quarter we patted ourselves in the back tho

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The quarterly all-hands were always this positive vibe on how our NPS (net promoter score) is really high; a new feature we launched; patents filed

In Q&A when people brought up "WhatsApp is gaining on us as per the media" the response was "nah, we're not in the same league"

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Never worked at a startup/scaleup before or after where as a dev I was in such an information vacuum on how the product is used/what the numbers are and not had any kind of "contact with reality"

If I'm honest with myself, no wonder competitors zoomed past and Skype is history

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It was fun, well paid, low stress and got to meet a lot of smart people tho! Not complaining - but a little transparency on how the business was *really* doing, focus+urgency would have helped

But our CEO was busy working to become Microsoft's next CEO - also did not help!

Throughout my time I didn't even know what our overall usage number was and if it was going up or down

From backchannels I heard it was going down for the flagship app, but leadership never shared these numbers on all hands or other group comms

TadasG 💻@tadasgedgaudas

@GergelyOrosz probably management didn't want to share because the user number was dropping?

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Also, back then being bought by Microsoft meant *so much* politics happening - even as a mid-level dev it felt too much

Skype merged with Lync, got MSN Messenger "retired" into Skype, reorg after reorg every 3-6 months (I stopped caring about where we reported into after the first few) etc

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My next job was at Skyscanner:

SUCH a stark contrast!!!

In HQ: a massive screen showing realtime daily stats on number of flight bookings, and revenue

Every day, an email with ~30+ charts on daily results on all dimensions you can think of, going out to all staff

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So, unspirisingly, at Skyscanner, as a dev you knew how much incremental revenue your feature brought in / how many new users or new signups etc

At Skype: had no idea. On your product you might have known the *total* users (if your team measured it) but nothing on growth, revenue etc

(PMs probably knew this, but if they did, didn't share to devs)

Now that Skype has been killed Flashback on how some of the fall...

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