Skype has breathed its last. On Friday, Microsoft representatives announced that the company plans to discontinue its video-calling service in early May. Surviving users are invited to migrate for free to Microsoft Teams, the company’s “modern communication and collaboration hub,” which comes with calendar and file-sharing capabilities. It is unclear whether they will take them up on the offer. There’s a chance you already use Microsoft Teams for work; there’s a slightly smaller chance you would never use it for anything else.

Skype was once one of the world’s most-visited websites. Microsoft originally paid $8.5 billion to acquire it in 2011 and introduced the software as a replacement for the then-ubiquitous MSN Messenger. At peak popularity, it became a verb: “I will Skype you” or “are you down to Skype?”. If we analyse the new lexicon, we can see a semantic split. The business use-case is now occupied by Zoom, with researchers identifying this linguistic takeover as early as 2020.

For casual video calls between family and friends, Skype was also overthrown by Apple, which offers a smoother replacement. The not-even-slightly-new term here is “FaceTime” (“Are you free for a FaceTime?” “We FaceTimed for six hours last night”). As with “to Google”, the actual software used is of little consequence to the act of FaceTime. A colleague recently asked if I was free “for a FaceTime” and then placed a call on WhatsApp instead, with her front camera on.

Skype’s demise has little to do with the Covid-era Zoom explosion and lots to do with the post-smartphone tech order: big screen for business, small screen for pleasure. Now that we’re used to being tethered to a handset, calling someone on their computer is an uncool imposition because it necessitates the kind of formal scheduling you’d have to do at a job. Skype had a mobile app, but it was beaten out by smoother and more sensible competitors. FaceTime, for example, has come packaged with the iPhone since 2010. It’s one of only three bright green default icons in the system, the other two being “Messages” and “Phone.” The implication is that all of them are essential and symbiotic. The user who cannot be bothered to exit their chatlog may simply press a camcorder icon to switch to the FaceTime function from within Messages. There’s a copycat function on WhatsApp, which is Meta’s ground-zero for group chats outside the US. The monolith has had video-call functionality since 2016. Facebook Messenger has had it since 2015.

Most people probably already talk to their contacts on at least one of these apps, depending on where they are in the world. Why go to the trouble of signing up to anything else, let alone a product that will force you to add them all over again while creating separate chat histories? Microsoft could have cashed in on this integrated racket were it not for the disastrous run of the Windows Phone, which only made it onto the market when its competitors were already household names. When I was at school, an acquaintance got bullied for having one — the tiled software made them look too much like the computers we had to use in IT lessons. If they had taken off, we might still be Skyping each other today.

It seems silly to mourn software in a tech-sceptic age. But Skype’s death is sad for what it represents. It is a casualty of the age of the desktop computer, which expected far less of our availability and attention than the current smartphone wave. Some people in May will probably try to “Teams” their friends and family members. To the rest of us, they’ll seem odd and quaint, like the last holdouts of a long-gone war.