How to kill a product with politics
Skype started out as an offshoot from peer-to-peer file-sharing app that was widely used to pirate music: Adding voice calls made it impossible for music companies to detect that music was being shared rather than person to person communications, and therefore somewhat protected from prosecution. To the surprise of the developers the voice function was vastly more popular that the file sharing service putting pressure on the super-nodes that relayed traffic between computers that could not connect directly on local networks because of firewalls and NAT: they had a choice between grow and or die and found a willing buyer in ebay.
Skype was fine for point-to-point connections, but video conferencing was not it forte, and suffered reliability problems scaling the super-nodes that were not designed for load balancing: Microsoft put quite a lot of investment into scaling the super-node infrastructure but dropped P2P in an attempt to get telco on-side for Windows Phone.
After the Window-8 disaster it really became a retail brand for corporate Lync Server: it is somewhat ironic that a cloud native technology was pushed into the arms of office collaboration and kept away from Azure where its UDP datagram baggage could overload host routers.
Until recently open-access videoconferencing was niche: Zoom did not defect Microsoft, AWS did by scaling the Zoom infrastructure, but politics was the real killer
