Legacy Support 101 with Microsoft

Screenshot from LinkedIn showing the option to add a Skype handle, even after Microsoft discontinued Skype for consumers. Photo by me.

Microsoft discontinued Skype for consumers in May (2025). Yet LinkedIn, which is also owned by Microsoft, still allows users to add a Skype address to their profile. This is not an accident. It is legacy.

Legacy appears when a system carries a field, an option or a menu item that no longer reflects the present, but lives on because removing it would create more problems than keeping it. The underlying schema still contains a field for Skype. Old integrations, old exports, old CRM pipelines and internal tools still depend on it. Erasing this field would break workflows that people have forgotten even exist.

Modern systems rarely forget cleanly. Data models survive longer than products. A discontinued feature can remain visible because the cost of removing it is unpredictable. A single field can anchor multiple processes that were built around assumptions made years earlier.

Or could just someone forgot to remove it hehe. But when dealing with legacy, deleting is active work. Keeping is passive and most (big corp) software ends up keeping.