Asher's Blog

When we started Eazipay about five years ago, Skype was still part of how many businesses communicated. We used it, and some of our banking partners used it as well. I even paid for a Skype subscription because the product remained useful to me. Yet Microsoft eventually retired Skype and moved users toward Teams.

I remember feeling that I wished I could somehow take the product and keep it alive, because it still did several things well. That feeling contains an important business lesson: a product does not disappear only because it is useless. Good software can die because the market around it has changed, its owner has found a more strategic product, its economics no longer justify continued investment or its underlying technology has become too expensive to modernise.

I had a similar reaction during my first meeting with Amazon. We used Amazon Chime, and I found the experience frustrating. In later business meetings, Zoom became the familiar tool. Amazon has since announced the end of the Chime service. A large company can build a functioning product and still decide that maintaining a separate communications platform is no longer the best use of its resources.

This is why founders should not confuse product quality with corporate survival. Quality is necessary, but a product also needs distribution, revenue, strategic relevance and an architecture that can keep evolving. Skype had enormous brand recognition and years of user history. Those advantages could not remove the pressure created by mobile-first communication, new collaboration habits and Microsoft’s decision to concentrate attention on Teams.

Software begins to disappear when the cost of keeping it competitive rises faster than the value it produces. Old systems accumulate assumptions. Every new feature must coexist with decisions made years earlier, and engineers spend increasing amounts of time protecting compatibility rather than improving the experience. Eventually, rebuilding may be almost equivalent to creating a new product, while the company already owns another platform capable of absorbing the most important users.

Distribution also changes the outcome. The product that people remember most fondly is not always the product that wins. Software attached to a dominant workplace suite, operating system, device or community can reach customers more cheaply and become the default. A technically better standalone product can slowly lose relevance if customers must make an additional decision and pay an additional bill to use it.

There is a pricing lesson here as well. I was paying for Skype, but evidently not enough users were paying enough money to make the old product strategically compelling forever. Usage without a durable economic model can create the appearance of importance while the product becomes increasingly difficult to justify inside the company. Founders must know who pays, why they pay, how that willingness changes and whether revenue can support the continuous rebuilding software requires.

The lesson is not that every product must live forever. Sometimes closing a product is the responsible decision because resources can create more value elsewhere. The deeper lesson is that founders should examine successful products while they are still successful. Is the architecture ageing? Is a platform shift changing user behaviour? Are we retaining users because they love the product or because migration is inconvenient? Does the product still matter to the company that owns it?

At Eazipay, this reminds me that today’s reliability cannot become tomorrow’s complacency. Customers may trust a product and still leave when another solution fits their changing work more naturally. We must continue to understand how businesses operate, modernise the foundations people cannot see and make sure the product remains economically valuable to both the customer and the company.

Good software sometimes disappears, and bad software sometimes survives for surprisingly long periods. The market does not award permanence as a prize for past usefulness. A product stays alive because a company keeps earning the right to invest in it, users keep choosing it and the technology keeps adapting to the way the world now works.