Say Goodbye to Skype

Amid the earth-shaking headlines this week, one headline in particular has caught the attention of both students and teachers of English alike: Skype is shutting down. A representative of Microsoft said in a blog post, “We will be retiring Skype in May 2025 to focus on Microsoft Teams.” Like many people, I was a little taken aback by the announcement, having used Skype since its release in the first decade of this century. The platform has enabled me to keep in touch with friends and family, in addition to facilitating countless English lessons with people in different countries.

The word 'Skype', like 'Google', inevitably became a verb as people began 'skyping' each other back in the 2000s, with 4 billion registered users by 2019. Undoubtedly, Skype has helped to shape modern communications, and it played a particularly important role during the pandemic, when competing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet also kept people connected. Microsoft Teams has grown in popularity in recent years, so I understand why the company might want to shift its focus. Jeff Teper from Microsoft has said that Skype users can export all their data to the platform for free and enjoy more features. It remains to be seen how many people will take heed.

Soon, the well-known S logo of Skype will disappear from our screens forever. It is time to say 'Sayonara' to the much-loved internet platform, a pioneer in the world of digital communications.

Comments

Interview with a Teacher

I recently asked a colleague, whom I will call Dominic, if he would kindly answer some questions about his experiences of teaching English as a foreign language. “It's for my blog,” I told him. He eyed me suspiciously for a moment, but then said he would cooperate on the condition that I don't use his real name. So, Dominic, when did you start teaching? I answered a job advert on Dave's ESL Cafe in 2015. It was for a teaching position in a town in Poland. I'd just completed a CELTA course and I thought that teaching abroad would give me an opportunity to see more of the world. That's what I thought, anyway. Something tells me that it wasn't what you expected? The owner of the school in Poland was, to put it bluntly, a bit of a weirdo. The walls of his office were covered with photographs of various people he'd met on his travels -- hundreds of them -- and there were cameras installed in the classrooms. He routinely spied on my lessons. He didn't al...

Three Tips for Learners

When not teaching English, I try to teach myself a little Spanish or Polish, the latter of which I find particularly challenging because Polish is a highly inflected language, and even simple utterances can invoke several grammar rules. Translate the sentence 'I drink green tea', for example, where there is a subject followed by a verb, an adjective and finally a noun. In Polish, you not only conjugate the verb, but also make the adjective agree with the gender of the noun AND change the endings of both of those words as they constitute the object of the verb. Do you see what people mean when they say that Polish is a hard language to learn? I know I'll never speak the language perfectly, but no one is asking me to. Therein lies a problem when it comes to language learners' expectations: Some people want perfection; they want to be fluent and flawless. Very often, though, you can't be both. You might speak English fluently, but make a lot of mistakes. On the other h...

How English Has Changed

Languages evolve over time, and English is no exception. Indeed, a native speaker of English might struggle to understand someone speaking the language as it was spoken in England five hundred years ago. In this post I look at four ways in which this lingua franca of the globalised world has changed since the days it was largely confined to the island known as Great Britain. 1. Word order The order of words in a sentence typically follows a subject-verb-object pattern; however, this hasn't always been the case. Whereas now you hear people say 'Mary picked flowers', for example, some Middle English texts placed the object before the verb. This shift in word order sometimes happens today, when people exchange traditional wedding vows, the phrase 'With this ring I thee wed' being one well-known example. 2. Pronouns The pronouns 'thou' and 'thee' have fallen out of use. Nowadays, we prefer to use 'you'. It's simpler, don't you think...

ONE CLICK ENGLISH

Search This Blog