As of 10 January 2018, Skype by Microsoft doesn’t accept Facebook logins and poses a problem for me. You see, when they launched the collaboration between Skype and Facebook, the unique selling point is that you can use one login for both the accounts and for someone like me, it is convenient not to have to remember so many userids and passwords.

So why not? And I went ahead to switch from my old account to a new one so I can login Skype from my Facebook.

Now I understand collaboration can be great and they can be a failure too. Seems that Microsoft and Facebook didn’t have such a successful collaboration. While some of the key features are not open up to Facebook login users like myself, for example, I couldn’t use the Skype app version with my login because it is not supported, instead, I can only stick with the desktop version. It was irritating but I lived with it, telling myself it is the best that I don’t have clients texting me on my mobile and that I can rest easy when I shut my laptop off.

For 2 years having this account had me accumulated quite a number of contacts, mainly for my clients. So when Microsoft announced that they are closing the accounts that utilize Facebook login, it definitely poses a headache for me. Without an email notification, they did it by logging me out of my own account out of the sudden and pop by an announcement that I longer can use my Facebook login and this account from 10 January 2018. Jeez, thanks a lot for making my day, Microsoft!

Opening a new Skype account is pretty simple since I have an outlook account that I’m using for my email kally@MiddleMe.net but it’s the transferring of contacts that I’m concerned about. So I look it up on the Help Page. Simple enough to send my contacts from my old account to my new account.

But the shocker is that I have to send a contact request to all my contacts??!

Imagine if I have thousands of contacts on my Skype, everyone will receive my spam contact request. And I have to send each request individually, which means I have to manually add them to my contact book! I must have not been doing it right so I checked and rechecked multiple times. I’m right! Fortunately for me, I only have a couple of contacts worth keeping so I only need to spam a few of my clients. Friends usually reach out to me via other means so I’m not so worried if I disappear from their Skype world.

I know I can always look for alternatives but Skype is one of the most commonly used business tools out there. I love Slack but it has limitations unless you subscribe to a paid subscription and one of its limitations is access to historical chats. Next is Telegram which I am using with some of my clients. The problem is that Telegram does not have voice calls, not in my region anyway and that poses a problem for me when I need to do recruitment for my clients. I prefer interviewing my incumbents through voice or video calls before I hand over to my clients for the second round of interview. Then there’s Whatsapp, which I am already using for personal and I’m keeping it that way.

So I’m back to Skype. Using a new account. And hopefully, this is the last time I will need to migrate my contacts. While I can understand it’s business decisions to end the collaboration, I don’t get it why they can’t make the transition smooth for users.

Why can’t they migrate the data backend seamlessly for you once you set up a new account? Or even request its users to change their logins instead of signing up a new account?

The truth is that they don’t really bother about Skype’s users.

They know they are the market leader and they exploit this fact that there’s nowhere else to move to. And I hate supporting these kinds of businesses who don’t care about their customers.

As a disgruntled customer, I’ll switch over to other services if there are better ones out there. Recommendations, anyone? Please do share with us if you found something can replace Skype.

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