Skype Qik

» see qik.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

I never installed Skype Qik. By late 2014 the short video category was already crowded by Vine and Snapchat, plus a few WhatsApp features that did most of what Qik claimed without making you download a separate app. Microsoft launched Qik on October 14, 2014 across iOS and Android, with a Windows Phone build that arrived the same day, pitched at people who wanted to send video clips to small groups without committing to a public profile.

The app was the second use of a name Skype already owned. The original Qik was a 2006 startup that streamed video from phones to the web, founded by Ramu Sunkara and Bhaskar Roy in 2006, then bought by Skype in January 2011 for around $150 million. After the Microsoft acquisition of Skype later that year, the original product was quietly retired in 2014 and the name was salvaged for the new app. The relaunch shipped without much of the livestream concept that had made the first Qik notable. It was a short clip messenger.

The shutdown came on a tight schedule. Microsoft posted a retirement notice on February 22, 2016 and gave users one month of warning. The servers went down on March 24, 2016, taking every clip on the platform with them. Microsoft said the features would be folded back into the main Skype app, which already had video messaging built in, and which most users had never left in the first place.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

Qik tried to solve a problem you could already solve. The app let you record up to 42-second clips, send them to a contact list, then watch your messages auto-delete after two weeks. It also let you record a Qik Flik, a reusable canned video reply for messages you did not want to type. The whole thing felt like a Microsoft demonstration of a competitor's feature set, packaged into an app most people on Skype did not realize existed.

~ why it failed ~

By 2014 the format was already decided. Snapchat had ten-second disappearing clips and Vine had six-second loops, while WhatsApp let you record voice and video inline from the conversation thread you were already in. Skype Qik was Microsoft's late entry in a market where the question of how to do mobile video messaging had been answered eighteen months earlier. The launch coverage in October 2014 was lukewarm and the app charts never picked it up.

~ the day it died ~

Microsoft did not call Qik a failure when it pulled the plug. The February 22, 2016 retirement post described it as a learning exercise that had taught the Skype team things it would now build into the main app. The clips on the platform stopped playing on March 24, 2016. Whatever videos were saved on individual phones survived. Anything stored only on the Qik servers went with the company.

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