Why Are We All Zooming And Not Skyping?

Remember when Skype was all the rage? People Skyped one another. Skyping was the in thing.

But now that the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has people confined indoors and working from home, Skype, Skyping, and Skyped are oddly absent from the discussion. Instead, people are turning to Zoom in by the thousands.

Zooming is now all the rage.

So, what happened to Skype? How did it fumble the digital ball so badly that we're now Zooming and not Skyping?

I had my suspicions but decided to ask both my followers on Twitter and my ZDNet family for their ideas.

It soon became clear why Skype has fallen by the wayside and Zoom is, well, zooming, with three areas standing out above the rest.

Must read: How to prevent your Zoom meetings being Zoom-bombed (gate-crashed) by trolls

First and foremost, Zoom is much easier to use than Skype. And I don't mean you and me here, I mean all the regular Joes and Josephines out there who don't find this so easy.

The muggles.

Non-technical people.

And Zoom really is easy to use, so much so that I'm impressed. I've gotten all sorts of people to use it with very little friction. People whose ideal app would have only have one button, and that button would be pre-pressed. Zoom is about as close to that as you can get, and yet has powerful features under the hood for those who understand how to wield such power.

Downloading Zoom is a doddle, installing it is painless, and getting people into a meeting is as simple as sending them a link.

It really doesn't get much easier than Zoom.

Secondly, bugs.

Yeah, I'd noticed these too.

Skype applications have not been the most reliable apps, whether on the desktop or mobile. I've used it on a variety of platforms -- Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android -- and they've all been headache-inducing. I wouldn't rank Skype as the worst app I've used, but it was always something that I couldn't trust and rely on fully.

The Skype apps are also pretty bloated, and updates would leave me scratching my head trying to figure out how to do something that I had no problems doing before the update. Bugs would take a long time to fix, and more bugs would pile up.

Thirdly, spam.

Skype has a big spam problem. Every time I open Skype (which, admittedly, these days is not that often) there's always a pile of spammy detritus to wade through.

Skype is not a program that I'd be happy giving to people who aren't used to handling spammy content.

A few people also mentioned the idea that Skype was a service before its time, and since its release in 2003, it has been through a lot of hands and shifted from a hybrid peer-to-peer service to a client-server service before ending up in Microsoft's hands. That's a long path for a service, and users, along with their expectations, have changed a lot in those 16 years.

What are your experiences with Skype and Zoom? Which one are you using? Why? Let me know below.