Skype is the epitome of technical debt. Millions of lines of code for a service that isn't technically difficult to provide anymore. When I was at Microsoft, I was told working on Skype was about as popular as being sent to a gulag.
The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.
I'm generally a big fan of Joel Spolsky, but in retrospect, I think this advice is just wrong, and I think Skype is a perfect counterpoint. That is, sometimes a rewrite is a horrible idea, but at the same time sometimes not doing a rewrite is a horrible idea. If making changes to the code becomes such a nightmare that your rate of progress is much less than your competitors, you're going to lose.
While there is still some good advice in that blog post, hard-and-fast rules are rarely correct. Most things in engineering are tradeoffs, and it's tough to know sometimes what the right balance is.
Sometimes the technology "background" changes so much that the codebase you have just becomes irrelevant.
We live in a world with WebRTC, embedded agents and digital telephony. The platforms, OSes, infrastructure are so different from how they were in 2009. Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more?
What I don't get is how MS couldn't use the Teams stack to power Skype as a consumer brand. Probably there was some effort but something got in the way. It might even have been a cultural barrier - Skype was an acquisition, and acquired codebases generally fossilise
Skype probably was rewritten multiple times - C++ client was replaced with Electron, and server API was broken many times as well. The reason Microsoft shuts down Skype is not because there is too much technical debt but because there are few paying customers and because there are new messengers like Telegram.
“Skype for Business” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business) sort-of was that. It put the “Skype” brand on “Lync”, which was a rebranded “Office Communicator” (IIRC, there were some technical changes along the line, too, but I may misremember that)
Funnily enough, I put that blog post in a sibling comment and described why I think it's bad advice. Why don't you think Skype is a perfect counterpoint to Joel's argument? I mean, Skype basically died because they didn't throw it away and start from scratch. Like the parent comment said, competitors came up, and what used to be a million line giant project was about a bajillion times easier when WhatsApp came along.
Yes, it's absolutely true getting the working bits correct is hard, by consigning yourself to a slow death doesn't seem like much of an improvement.
They did launch a from scratch electron crap at least once. That version didn't migrate settings/account. Had to help at least 3 different people who suddenly lost access to their contacts.
Then my guess is you're not old enough to have used it much when it first came out. Because at that time, it wasn't really competing with other internet calling services, it was competing with international phone rates that were dollars a minute. In some cases it actually made long distance relationships viable that otherwise weren't.
Damn, this is the primary way I talk to my parents and my grandmother.
Genuine question, what do people here recommend as a replacement for non-technical people? I'll need to walk my grandmother through the process of setting something remotely.
No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out, and I'd need something that can run on a computer. I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.
> No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out,
So FaceTime lets you make a link that you can give to someone with a web browser and they can use it to reach you, and it works pretty well. You might just try it.
> I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.
That's probably the biggest limitation: It's a webpage for calling you (the person with the iPhone), not a page for you to call them. If you want them to open a app/page when they are available, I think Messenger is best in terms of features and usability.
If your parents/grandmother aren't already on WhatsApp I don't think you should link their phone number (which might be linked to their banking etc) with a public chat system because there are a _lot_ of online scams targeting the elderly through WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and linking to the mobile number associated with other (higher value) services. It is very easy to lock-down Messenger so nobody who isn't already a friend can't target them.
I was looking into it, and it looks like there's a free version of Teams. I think that might be the easiest to get them to onboard to simply I suspect it'll be easier to talk them into something with the "Microsoft" branding.
I hadn't really thought about scams. I'll keep that in mind.
Google Duo (might be lumped in with Meet now) worked well for me when I was on Android and everyone around be was iOS. It's cross platform and worked out of the box.
Discord probably has a bit more going on since it also has a community focus, but it may be worth looking into since it's a platform that won't be going away anytime soon. It also works from the browser if having them download something is a headache.
WhatsApp works well for most people and runs on any device.
I gifted a MacBook, iPhone and Apple Watch to my elderly father, and I now use FaceTime. He came from a PC and is not technical, but he adapted fairly easily. (The fall detection feature on the watch gives us both some peace of mind.)
I would make the jump to Signal. It's super easy and secure. Has all the features you'd need (minus the online status). It's how I communicate with my whole family.
Actually I just realized my grandmother doesn't have a smartphone of any kind, so I think Signal is out regardless.
I might see if I can just migrate her to the free Teams service from MS. It hurts me a little as an annoying Linux guy but I think this would be the easiest option.
I'm still using it after starting on one of the early Skype versions. At over 20 years, it's lasted me longer than ICQ, IRC or an other messenger. Most of my contacts no longer use Skype but it's the primary way I contact my family and I can't think of an obvious replacement that would fully satisfy my use case.
Skype’s peer-to-peer architecture seemed like an interesting idea. I mean that’s the sort of thing the internet was supposed to facilitate, distributed communications.
Of course MS screwed it up pretty quickly after buying it, and the name has been a mockery of it’s former potential for much longer than it was an actual thing.
I forgot about that. It used to create a lot of issues in a shared house I once lived in, we had a housemate who left Skype running and flooded our router with junk packets.
Lots of good times on Skype in high school. Plenty of 12 hour calls on that service for free, and I really appreciate that it was a thing. It was really solid for the time. We had so much fun buying $10 of Skype credit when we finally were old enough to get jobs and then prank calling people over Skype. Very juvenile, but that's what we were.
Thankfully, P2P calling and video calling in general is a solved problem now with web standards included. I'm glad Skype was there when it was.
I have no doubt that we'll see stories about niche industries still built on the backs of Skype that are scrambling to adapt. Nowadays, I suppose it's likely a rounding error compared to other ways that geopolitical forces are disrupting various industries... but we should all be aware of the implicit commitment we make to users when releasing any B2C service, and how people will build entire livelihoods around the simplest of services in ways we can't anticipate.
New messengers are worse than old ones. You could sign up for Skype using just login and password and for modern messengers you need to provide at least a phone number, and if the trend continues tomorrow they will start requiring biometric data I assume.
Anyone knows of an alternative to Skype to make free calls to 1-800 numbers? I was keeping Skype in my back pocket during trips abroad for that exact reason (allowed me to get away with using data only eSIMs and still be able to call bank/airline if something happens).
Another option you could look into is a mobile VoIP app like Acrobits Softphone or Groundwire with a VoIP SIP provider like voip.ms. The apps are a one-time purchase (~$6.99-9.99 last time I checked). Toll-free calls are free and the airtime from voip.ms is incredibly cheap (local calls start at $0.01/min).
This. And most importantly for me, Skype allowed to call using my numbers (for bank it will look like i am calling from my cell). Any other voip service would just put random number which will trigger additional security checks.
My banks mobile app has a Call Helpdesk button, which simply dials the support number with ',,,<long random number>' appended. That gets you into the fast-track queue and they don't need to ask any security questions as they know it's you. They don't look at the dialing number at all.
I still use Skype, mainly out of habit, but I guess it's finally time to move on. Telegram seems like the best alternative for me, but I wonder—what are others switching to? Feels like every few years, we have to migrate to a new chat platform.
That’s fair, but almost every messaging app does this (WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, etc.). The question is: do you trust Telegram more or less than the alternatives? Personally, I see it as the lesser evil compared to some big tech options.
Absolutely wild that the entire world got locked inside their homes and everybody became a remote worker and that wasn't enough for Skype or Teams to get used. Embarrassing! and this is the end result.
I used Teams through most of lockdown. The developers were all on macs, and used slack for chat, so the only feature of teams we used was for the daily stand-up video call.
The desktop app ran very poorly on macs, and left everyone pretty much blaming it whenever their Mac acted up.
I only used the website version myself, and it was fine, so I'm assuming there was just some hanky programming in an election wrapper that needed optimizing.
They forgot Skype existed and everyone used Zoom. Then Microsoft scrambled and used their monopoly power in Windows to force Teams on everyone. Teams was not a thing until at least half a year into the pandemic.
Long time coming. The only one in my social group who still used it was my wife - and just for the function to call regular phones. Calling family in the US/MX from EU was pretty cheap with the Skype credit option.
Been using Skype Manager to handle numbers for a few accounts in our business. I haven't found info if it will be possible to migrate these numbers to Teams. Does anyone have info about this?
It's quite interesting that despite chat and video messaging apps being those that should stick for long they actually tend to be replaced with relative ease.
Since I started my online journey I've been through ICQ, IRC, MSN, Skype, Hangouts, Kik, Teams, Telegram, Whatsapp, and many many others I don't even remember.
Yet at every point it seems that something breaks, they feel like they have to add more and more features, core features start sucking, etc.
Whatsapp is the only one that stuck since I started using it, and I suspect part of the reason is both the fact my friends and relatives just won't move from it (it essentially replaced SMS) and the fact that Whatsapp cares a lot about the client being very performing even on lowest end old devices.
Don't forget MSN Messenger was discontinued/merged into Skype. So they fucked it not once, but twice. Literally handed over their dominant position in instant messaging for nothing.
Wait - what about MS Lync/Office Communicator? I don't remember if that was just a branding change of "MSN Messenger for Business" about the time right before the Skype acquisition, or folding in (and failing with) yet another IM/Video chat solution. So should the count actually be three?
Yeah, it's actually three, though only from a branding perspective. They did rebrand Lync/Office Communicator as "Skype for Business" for a bit, though I don't think there was ever any code shared and it was just a branding thing.
Honestly I think they simply don't care, and from their perspective they finally have gotten it right with Teams.
It was a p2p phone and video call app that Microsoft purchased when mobile phones started to take off. Phones cannot participate in a p2p network the same way a desktop can, so it had to be re-architected to use central servers, and they never got it to work the same after that.
I vaguely remember they making unusable in some situation that many people wanted, and people drifted away from it.
Combined with not advertising it at all recently, and other services taking the spotlight ("Let's facetime!"), I'm not surprised that people have largely stopped using it.
Skype is the epitome of technical debt. Millions of lines of code for a service that isn't technically difficult to provide anymore. When I was at Microsoft, I was told working on Skype was about as popular as being sent to a gulag.
The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.
This Joel on Software blog post is now 25 years old, https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-..., but when it first came out it was widely viewed as gospel.
I'm generally a big fan of Joel Spolsky, but in retrospect, I think this advice is just wrong, and I think Skype is a perfect counterpoint. That is, sometimes a rewrite is a horrible idea, but at the same time sometimes not doing a rewrite is a horrible idea. If making changes to the code becomes such a nightmare that your rate of progress is much less than your competitors, you're going to lose.
While there is still some good advice in that blog post, hard-and-fast rules are rarely correct. Most things in engineering are tradeoffs, and it's tough to know sometimes what the right balance is.
Sometimes the technology "background" changes so much that the codebase you have just becomes irrelevant.
We live in a world with WebRTC, embedded agents and digital telephony. The platforms, OSes, infrastructure are so different from how they were in 2009. Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more?
What I don't get is how MS couldn't use the Teams stack to power Skype as a consumer brand. Probably there was some effort but something got in the way. It might even have been a cultural barrier - Skype was an acquisition, and acquired codebases generally fossilise
So the answer can change over time. You have to periodically re-assess the benefits of a rewrite.
Skype probably was rewritten multiple times - C++ client was replaced with Electron, and server API was broken many times as well. The reason Microsoft shuts down Skype is not because there is too much technical debt but because there are few paying customers and because there are new messengers like Telegram.
“Skype for Business” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business) sort-of was that. It put the “Skype” brand on “Lync”, which was a rebranded “Office Communicator” (IIRC, there were some technical changes along the line, too, but I may misremember that)
It got replaced by Teams.
And Skype had to maintain compatibility with many of these services that came and went.
> I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.
I'm surprised that you are surprised!
Rewriting a million-lines-of-code project from scratch without the stupid bits is easy. Getting the equivalent of the working bits, instead...
Joel expressed this concept quite well already 25 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Funnily enough, I put that blog post in a sibling comment and described why I think it's bad advice. Why don't you think Skype is a perfect counterpoint to Joel's argument? I mean, Skype basically died because they didn't throw it away and start from scratch. Like the parent comment said, competitors came up, and what used to be a million line giant project was about a bajillion times easier when WhatsApp came along.
Yes, it's absolutely true getting the working bits correct is hard, by consigning yourself to a slow death doesn't seem like much of an improvement.
Skype is 20 years old.
Tech has advanced enormously in that time.
They did launch a from scratch electron crap at least once. That version didn't migrate settings/account. Had to help at least 3 different people who suddenly lost access to their contacts.
Sell the brand to Signal
> The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version
I am not.
The brand is strong in a negative way, I have never met anyone who ever liked Skype.
Then my guess is you're not old enough to have used it much when it first came out. Because at that time, it wasn't really competing with other internet calling services, it was competing with international phone rates that were dollars a minute. In some cases it actually made long distance relationships viable that otherwise weren't.
I have. Skype was very popular in many places around the world.
Damn, this is the primary way I talk to my parents and my grandmother.
Genuine question, what do people here recommend as a replacement for non-technical people? I'll need to walk my grandmother through the process of setting something remotely.
No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out, and I'd need something that can run on a computer. I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.
> No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out,
So FaceTime lets you make a link that you can give to someone with a web browser and they can use it to reach you, and it works pretty well. You might just try it.
> I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.
That's probably the biggest limitation: It's a webpage for calling you (the person with the iPhone), not a page for you to call them. If you want them to open a app/page when they are available, I think Messenger is best in terms of features and usability.
If your parents/grandmother aren't already on WhatsApp I don't think you should link their phone number (which might be linked to their banking etc) with a public chat system because there are a _lot_ of online scams targeting the elderly through WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and linking to the mobile number associated with other (higher value) services. It is very easy to lock-down Messenger so nobody who isn't already a friend can't target them.
I was looking into it, and it looks like there's a free version of Teams. I think that might be the easiest to get them to onboard to simply I suspect it'll be easier to talk them into something with the "Microsoft" branding.
I hadn't really thought about scams. I'll keep that in mind.
FaceTime requires the initiator have a Mac.
Mac users can call others. Others cannot call Mac.
Yeah, and I don't have a Mac computer anymore, and neither do my parents or my grandmother.
I coordinated with my parents, we're gonna try the free Teams thing.
Google Duo (might be lumped in with Meet now) worked well for me when I was on Android and everyone around be was iOS. It's cross platform and worked out of the box.
Discord probably has a bit more going on since it also has a community focus, but it may be worth looking into since it's a platform that won't be going away anytime soon. It also works from the browser if having them download something is a headache.
Google Duo is gone. The functionality has moved to Meet, causing much confusion for non-technical users and annoyance for everyone.
WhatsApp works well for most people and runs on any device.
I gifted a MacBook, iPhone and Apple Watch to my elderly father, and I now use FaceTime. He came from a PC and is not technical, but he adapted fairly easily. (The fall detection feature on the watch gives us both some peace of mind.)
I would make the jump to Signal. It's super easy and secure. Has all the features you'd need (minus the online status). It's how I communicate with my whole family.
I use Signal, and I've gotten my parents to use it for texting as well, but I don't think that they have used Signal desktop.
That's likely what we'll end up using since I've already onboarded my mom and my dad on this.
Why not just use something like Google Meet? You send a link and the other person just needs a browser.
It's a pain to deal with syncing issues on Signal Desktop.
I gave my grandmother an old iPad I had. It’s been amazing.
She’s also in Iran, so it’s one of the only services that somehow the govt doesn’t target when killing video call apps.
If your grandmother happens to have a Google account already, Google Hangouts. [1]
Wouldn't need to set up anything. And works as reliably as anything I've seen.
EDIT: Signal is a very HN recommendation for drop dead simplicity. Syncing keys?
[1] https://hangouts.google.com
Actually I just realized my grandmother doesn't have a smartphone of any kind, so I think Signal is out regardless.
I might see if I can just migrate her to the free Teams service from MS. It hurts me a little as an annoying Linux guy but I think this would be the easiest option.
I'm still using it after starting on one of the early Skype versions. At over 20 years, it's lasted me longer than ICQ, IRC or an other messenger. Most of my contacts no longer use Skype but it's the primary way I contact my family and I can't think of an obvious replacement that would fully satisfy my use case.
Skype’s peer-to-peer architecture seemed like an interesting idea. I mean that’s the sort of thing the internet was supposed to facilitate, distributed communications.
Of course MS screwed it up pretty quickly after buying it, and the name has been a mockery of it’s former potential for much longer than it was an actual thing.
RIP Skype, we never met you.
I forgot about that. It used to create a lot of issues in a shared house I once lived in, we had a housemate who left Skype running and flooded our router with junk packets.
Lots of good times on Skype in high school. Plenty of 12 hour calls on that service for free, and I really appreciate that it was a thing. It was really solid for the time. We had so much fun buying $10 of Skype credit when we finally were old enough to get jobs and then prank calling people over Skype. Very juvenile, but that's what we were.
Thankfully, P2P calling and video calling in general is a solved problem now with web standards included. I'm glad Skype was there when it was.
More discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43202052
That's unfortunate, I was still using as a cheaper option for international calls to landlines.
Is there any good EU alternative for this specifically ?
How will I check if my mic is working now?
I assume this was a joke, but if you do want an actual way, I always used Audacity for audio tests.
https://www.audacityteam.org/
This reminds me of how Yahoo Messenger was silently a significant part of the oil trade, and its shutdown may have subtly made the industry more opaque: https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/oil-traders-prepa...
I have no doubt that we'll see stories about niche industries still built on the backs of Skype that are scrambling to adapt. Nowadays, I suppose it's likely a rounding error compared to other ways that geopolitical forces are disrupting various industries... but we should all be aware of the implicit commitment we make to users when releasing any B2C service, and how people will build entire livelihoods around the simplest of services in ways we can't anticipate.
New messengers are worse than old ones. You could sign up for Skype using just login and password and for modern messengers you need to provide at least a phone number, and if the trend continues tomorrow they will start requiring biometric data I assume.
Anyone knows of an alternative to Skype to make free calls to 1-800 numbers? I was keeping Skype in my back pocket during trips abroad for that exact reason (allowed me to get away with using data only eSIMs and still be able to call bank/airline if something happens).
Another option you could look into is a mobile VoIP app like Acrobits Softphone or Groundwire with a VoIP SIP provider like voip.ms. The apps are a one-time purchase (~$6.99-9.99 last time I checked). Toll-free calls are free and the airtime from voip.ms is incredibly cheap (local calls start at $0.01/min).
It's not free but you can try the Burner app.
Google Voice is pretty cheap for that use case.
Not available in Canada sadly.
if you don't call 800-numbers often, it's a tiny economic cost...
This. And most importantly for me, Skype allowed to call using my numbers (for bank it will look like i am calling from my cell). Any other voip service would just put random number which will trigger additional security checks.
Would love to hear about service doing that
My banks mobile app has a Call Helpdesk button, which simply dials the support number with ',,,<long random number>' appended. That gets you into the fast-track queue and they don't need to ask any security questions as they know it's you. They don't look at the dialing number at all.
I still use Skype, mainly out of habit, but I guess it's finally time to move on. Telegram seems like the best alternative for me, but I wonder—what are others switching to? Feels like every few years, we have to migrate to a new chat platform.
I find telegram is amazing for meeting people you don’t already know, especially in group chats or for having slightly more anonymity.
Signal is great if you already know everyone you’re talking with and don’t really care for large group chats (100s of anonymous strangers).
Telegram requires permission to view all your contacts on iOS :)
So I refuse to use it now.
That’s fair, but almost every messaging app does this (WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, etc.). The question is: do you trust Telegram more or less than the alternatives? Personally, I see it as the lesser evil compared to some big tech options.
WhatsApp doesn't require contact permissions to work. Neither do other apps I use for messaging like Facebook Messenger, Instagram, or Snapchat.
iMessage sort of does, but that's only because it's more a part of the OS, which already has your contacts anyway.
Absolutely wild that the entire world got locked inside their homes and everybody became a remote worker and that wasn't enough for Skype or Teams to get used. Embarrassing! and this is the end result.
I used Teams through most of lockdown. The developers were all on macs, and used slack for chat, so the only feature of teams we used was for the daily stand-up video call.
The desktop app ran very poorly on macs, and left everyone pretty much blaming it whenever their Mac acted up.
I only used the website version myself, and it was fine, so I'm assuming there was just some hanky programming in an election wrapper that needed optimizing.
They forgot Skype existed and everyone used Zoom. Then Microsoft scrambled and used their monopoly power in Windows to force Teams on everyone. Teams was not a thing until at least half a year into the pandemic.
Long time coming. The only one in my social group who still used it was my wife - and just for the function to call regular phones. Calling family in the US/MX from EU was pretty cheap with the Skype credit option.
Been using Skype Manager to handle numbers for a few accounts in our business. I haven't found info if it will be possible to migrate these numbers to Teams. Does anyone have info about this?
What happened? It's kind of hard to fuck up a chat app. The Skype ring tone is iconic.
It's quite interesting that despite chat and video messaging apps being those that should stick for long they actually tend to be replaced with relative ease.
Since I started my online journey I've been through ICQ, IRC, MSN, Skype, Hangouts, Kik, Teams, Telegram, Whatsapp, and many many others I don't even remember.
Yet at every point it seems that something breaks, they feel like they have to add more and more features, core features start sucking, etc.
Whatsapp is the only one that stuck since I started using it, and I suspect part of the reason is both the fact my friends and relatives just won't move from it (it essentially replaced SMS) and the fact that Whatsapp cares a lot about the client being very performing even on lowest end old devices.
Don't forget MSN Messenger was discontinued/merged into Skype. So they fucked it not once, but twice. Literally handed over their dominant position in instant messaging for nothing.
Wait - what about MS Lync/Office Communicator? I don't remember if that was just a branding change of "MSN Messenger for Business" about the time right before the Skype acquisition, or folding in (and failing with) yet another IM/Video chat solution. So should the count actually be three?
That's Teams. MS Lync was rebranded as "Skype for Business" which was then rebranded as Teams.
Yeah, it's actually three, though only from a branding perspective. They did rebrand Lync/Office Communicator as "Skype for Business" for a bit, though I don't think there was ever any code shared and it was just a branding thing.
Honestly I think they simply don't care, and from their perspective they finally have gotten it right with Teams.
It was a p2p phone and video call app that Microsoft purchased when mobile phones started to take off. Phones cannot participate in a p2p network the same way a desktop can, so it had to be re-architected to use central servers, and they never got it to work the same after that.
Wonder if P2P networking is hindered by the hardware back then vs now. I can imagine now most phones could deal with P2P networking just fine.
Software wise though idk if there is limitations baked into iOS and Android that limit this
I vaguely remember they making unusable in some situation that many people wanted, and people drifted away from it.
Combined with not advertising it at all recently, and other services taking the spotlight ("Let's facetime!"), I'm not surprised that people have largely stopped using it.
It's Teams now isn't it? Some of the links generated by teams still have the word Skype in them.
Teams was "Skype for business" which besides branding had little to do with Skype.
As far as I know, Teams evolved from their business product. Which went through multiple rebrands in a short time span, including Skype for Business.
I'm not 100% sure but I suspect the canibalised the skype protocol in some capacity for Teams.
Will we ever have communication tools more durable and predictable (with known and managed failure modes and privacy expectations) than paper mail?
Standardised protocol? independent of any single entity or subscription? readable without special technology? universal service infrastructure?
That is called email
Another Ars [dupe]
"Embrace, extend, extinguish"
Considering that Microsoft has owned Skype for 14 years of its 22 year lifespan, I don't think that this applies here.