Skype? Has it exhausted its innnovative reach

Covid has underlined the decline of the platform that used to be the standard for internet calls: Skype. In the past, its disruptive force was such that the English verb "to skype" was coined to indicate the possibility of making calls thanks to new technologies. "The pandemic has instead reiterated the fact that Skype has exhausted its innovative reach since it was acquired by Microsoft, which then launched Teams in 2017, playing a similar function but within a broader package of services", says Andrea Fosfuri, Full Professor at the Bocconi Department of Management and Technology.

Today the market for video conferencing is mature: there are several platforms available and many of these are specializing, for example, in the management of multi-conferences, to stand out from the competition. "There is also WhatsApp that allows you to make calls and, thanks to the new use that young people have begun to make, has transformed the written message into a voice message", continues Fosfuri, adding that the exchange of voice messages resembles an asynchronous phone call. However, according to the Bocconi Professor, the revolution of Skype and above all of the subsequent digital platforms has also ended up influencing the classic telecommunication operators which now, not surprisingly, focus their commercial offer on data traffic and offer the option to make calls free of charge.