Ask HN: What happens when a major company does nothing with a major purchase?

4 points

11 years ago

A friend of mine reminded me Skype Qik exists. Skype purchased Qik, a short video messaging app (think along the lines of Snapchat), for $150 million in January 2011.

Before the purchase, Andreessen Horowitz were major investors, so was a bunch of other people who get mentioned here on HN periodically.

Skype was then bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion in May 2011, only several months later. In April 2014, they announced they were shutting Qik down, and did so.

Yet, in October 2014, they announced they relaunched it as a new version.

No one uses Qik, that I'm aware of, and the original shutdown notification in April 2014 said they were shutting it down and refunding users (people had to pay for this?!) because they folded the entire feature set into the normal Skype client.

Yet, 12 months ago they released (possibly the final version of) Qik clients for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone.

So, what happens when a company just... forgets they bought something, and doesn't properly discontinue it? Does this not harm the brand? Does anyone at Microsoft or Skype know this still exists?

References:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_Qik

http://www.skype.com/en/qik/

Edit:

I might be wrong about Qik being dead. Android's newest version was released in June 2015 according to the Play Store, and the latest iOS version last month. Wikipedia's article was out of date, and I just updated it.

Who is actually using this thing, if according to Microsoft/Skype, the main Skype client inherited all the features?