Skype to ring for last time today after over two decades of connecting people across the world
After two decades of connecting people, Skype will ring for the last time on May 5. Microsoft is retiring the internet calling pioneer, as it sharpens focus on its newer flagship platform, Teams. Skype's sunset marks another chapter in Microsoft's graveyard of mishandled high-stakes bets — joining the likes of Internet Explorer and Windows Phone. Microsoft bought Skype in 2011 for US$8.5 billion, outbidding Google and Facebook. Back then, Skype had 150 million monthly users. But in 2020, that dropped to just 23 million. Microsoft says Teams has 320 million active users today.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Business Times
an hour ago
- Business Times
We need a new deal for the Web
GIVEN that Google attracts more than 136 billion visits a month – as many as the next 12 most popular websites combined – it is easy to see how a US federal judge concluded last year that the company ran a monopoly in online search and had abused its market dominance. Last week, Judge Amit Mehta heard the final arguments about what remedies to impose. His conclusions are expected in August. The US justice department, which launched the antitrust lawsuit, is demanding that Google be broken up. It wants to force the company to sell its Chrome browser, ban the massive payments it makes to Apple, Samsung and Mozilla to be their default search engine, and share data with competitors. That would surely be a triumph for free-market competition, motherhood and apple pie. Yet, as ever with regulatory interventions, the skill lies in ensuring that any corrective action anticipates tomorrow's challenges rather than just trying to fix today's problems. That's especially tough right now. As the judge acknowledged, the digital economy is evolving fast thanks to the light-speed diffusion of artificial intelligence. Some suggest that AI might even undermine the financial viability of the open, human, ad-supported Web on which Google has gorged. However much it may (or may not) abuse its market dominance, Google remains the strongest champion of the existing Web and many users would miss it if it were gone. Since being invented 36 years ago, the Web has emerged as one of humanity's most precious resources, giving any online user anywhere access to almost all of the world's knowledge. It has also become the foundation on which many thousands of digital businesses have been built. But it has its darker deformities and there is a risk that AI might further degrade it in two insidious ways. First, the big AI companies are in effect strip-mining all websites for content to train their models and paying back almost nothing in return to sustain the ecosystem. At present, Google accounts for about 90 per cent of the global search market and directs a torrent of traffic – and advertising – to content sites. Even though they may (understandably) complain about the terms, some content creators fear the trade itself may be in jeopardy because far fewer users would visit their sites. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up AI models aggregate and summarise the Web's content rather than encouraging users to visit the original content source. That may destroy the financial incentives for creating new content. 'I think that is a risk,' Laura Chambers, chief executive of the technology company Mozilla, tells me. 'How can we ensure that the Internet remains healthy?' The obvious survival mechanism for creators is to build walled gardens by erecting more paywalls around their content, or to move to closed channels off the open Web. For many companies, it may make sense to deepen direct-to-consumer business models via social media or their own apps. But both trends would further devalue the richness, utility and universality of the Web. The second threat is that AI models are increasingly flooding the Web with machine-generated slop. For the first time in a decade, bots have overtaken humans on the Web, accounting for an estimated 51 per cent of total traffic, according to the data and US cybersecurity group Imperva. The ability of generative AI to create plausible content at minimal cost means this trend is only likely to accelerate. An AI-mediated Web could move it further towards a 'dark forest', an increasingly hostile space populated by predatory bots that seize on any living thing. We may not like our current surveillance capitalism, in which users are tracked and targeted with ads. Subordination capitalism would be still worse. Yet, there are more positive visions of the Web's future, as recently sketched out by Kevin Scott, chief technology officer of Microsoft, which runs Bing, a very distant second in search. The increasing interaction of bots means that new open protocols are being developed to enable interoperability on this agentic Web. That creates the possibility for a different Web architecture and a 'new deal', in which 'everybody's incentives are aligned, where the creators and consumers have their interests balanced and there aren't a bunch of weird intermediaries constraining how utility and value gets exchanged', Scott told The Verge. No one yet knows exactly how to build such a glorious future. But whatever Judge Mehta can do to help nudge us in that direction would be appreciated. FINANCIAL TIMES
Business Times
an hour ago
- Business Times
Singapore stocks rise post Trump-Xi talks; STI up 0.4%
[SINGAPORE] The local bourse ended Friday (Jun 6) in a positive territory after a call between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping boosted investors' confidence. The benchmark Straits Times Index (STI) rose 0.4 per cent or 16.60 points to end at 3,934.29. Across the broader market, gainers beat losers 266 to 205 as 849.5 million securities worth S$1.1 billion changed hands. Xi and Trump agreed to further dialogue on trade after their call on Thursday evening. Trump said that disputes over rare-earth exports were resolved, and he had accepted China's invitation to visit. Beijing said it had complied with the terms of last month's trade truce. Trump also reversed his stance on Chinese students, welcoming them to study in the US. Maybank's research team noted in a report on Friday: 'While this may be a positive development for risk, we are also wary that Trump may simply shift his attention to another country instead of China.' The team expects Trump's trade and tax policy to continue swinging the markets, and highlighted that Trump and Musk's feud on social media offset some equity gains from positive US-China trade developments. 'We hold on to selling US dollar on rally alongside fading US exceptionalism, and a weaker NFP (non-farm payrolls) print would reinforce the narrative that US exceptionalism is indeed fading,' wrote the team. On the STI, Sembcorp Industries led the gains, up 3 per cent or S$0.20 at S$6.85. SIA was at the bottom of the list, down 1.3 per cent or S$0.09 at S$7.09 on a cum-dividend basis. The trio of local banks ended the day mixed. OCBC was up 0.3 per cent or S$0.05 at S$16.28. DBS rose 0.2 per cent or S$0.10 at S$45.12. UOB was down 0.1 per cent or S$0.04 at S$35.25 on a cum-dividend basis. Regional markets closed mixed on Friday. Japan's Nikkei 225 rose 0.5 per cent, while the Bursa Malaysia Kuala Lumpur Composite Index dropped 0.1 per cent. Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index was down 0.5 per cent.
AsiaOne
an hour ago
- AsiaOne
Trump and Xi agree to more talks as trade disputes brew, World News
WASHINGTON/BEIJING — US President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping confronted weeks of brewing trade tensions and a battle over critical minerals in a rare leader-to-leader call on Thursday (June 5) that left key issues to further talks. During the more than one-hour-long call, Xi told Trump to back down from trade measures that roiled the global economy and warned him against threatening steps on Taiwan, according to a Chinese government summary. But Trump said on social media that the talks focused primarily on trade led to "a very positive conclusion," announcing further lower-level US-China discussions, and that "there should no longer be any questions respecting the complexity of Rare Earth products." He later told reporters: "We're in very good shape with China and the trade deal." The leaders also invited each other to visit their respective countries. The highly anticipated call came in the middle of a dispute between Washington and Beijing in recent weeks over "rare earths" minerals that threatened to tear up a fragile truce in the trade war between the two biggest economies. It was not clear from either countries' statements that the issue had been resolved. A US delegation led by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Trade Representative Jamieson Greer will meet with their Chinese counterparts "shortly at a location to be determined," Trump said on social media. The countries struck a 90-day deal on May 12 to roll back some of the triple-digit, tit-for-tat tariffs they had placed on each other since Trump's January inauguration. Though stocks rallied, the temporary deal did not address broader concerns that strain the bilateral relationship, from the illicit fentanyl trade to the status of democratically governed Taiwan and US complaints about China's state-dominated, export-driven economic model. Since returning to the White House in January, Trump has repeatedly threatened an array of punitive measures on trading partners, only to revoke some of them at the last minute. The on-again, off-again approach has baffled world leaders and spooked business executives. Major US stock indexes were higher on Thursday. China's decision in April to suspend exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets continues to disrupt supplies needed by automakers, computer chip manufacturers and military contractors around the world. Beijing sees mineral exports as a source of leverage - halting those exports could put domestic political pressure on the Republican US president if economic growth sags because companies cannot make mineral-powered products. The 90-day deal to roll back tariffs and trade restrictions is tenuous. Trump has accused China of violating the agreement and has ordered curbs on chip-design software and other shipments to China. Beijing rejected the claim and threatened counter-measures. "The US side should take a realistic view of the progress made and withdraw the negative measures imposed on China," the Chinese government said in a statement summarising Xi's call with Trump published by the state-run Xinhua news agency. "Xi Jinping emphasised that the United States should handle the Taiwan issue prudently." Top rivals [[nid:718609]] In recent years, the United States has identified China as its top geopolitical rival and the only country in the world able to challenge the US economically and militarily. Despite this and repeated tariff announcements, Trump has spoken admiringly of Xi, including of the Chinese leader's toughness and ability to stay in power without the term limits imposed on US presidents. Trump has long pushed for a call or a meeting with Xi, but China has rejected that as not in keeping with its traditional approach of working out agreement details before the leaders talk. The US president and his aides see leader-to-leader talks as vital to sort through log-jams that have vexed lower-level officials in difficult negotiations. Thursday's call came at Trump's request, China said. It's not clear when the two men last spoke. Both sides said they spoke on Jan 17, days before Trump's inauguration and Trump has repeatedly said that he had spoken to Xi since taking office on Jan. 20. He has declined to say when any call took place or to give details of their conversation. China had said that the two leaders had not had any recent phone calls. The talks are being closely watched by investors worried that a chaotic trade war could disrupt supply chains in the key months before the Christmas holiday shopping season. Trump's tariffs are the subject of ongoing litigation in US courts. Trump has met Xi on several occasions, including exchange visits in 2017, but they have not met face to face since 2019 talks in Osaka, Japan. Xi last travelled to the US in November 2023, for a summit with then-President Joe Biden, resulting in agreements to resume military-to-military communications and curb fentanyl production. [[nid:718697]]
