My wild guess would be that their finance people do not like a monotonically increasing liability on the books. Since some users will never use their credits, this is their way of satisfying the bean counters.

That was my thought. But as far as the bean counters are concerned, they would base it on an aging schedule. Unused credits stop being counted at 100% after x number of months.

But there isn't really any reason to disable them in the software. Especially since they can be reenabled.

Just like if you have fully depreciated an office desk, that doesn't mean you march into that person's office and take it away. Sorry, this desk must be thrown out as it is now fully depreciated!

So I think it is an attempt at scraping more money out of their users.

"Sorry, this desk must be thrown out as it is now fully depreciated!"

This gave me a good laugh. With lowering interest rates and quantitative easing not pumping up the economy as expected, any bets on long before this becomes a reality?

It sounds silly, but these things happen! Just ask anyone who has worked in a Fortune-500 company for at least a few years. Things in good condition get replaced because there's a budget for replacing them, with asking the employees actually using those things (and sometimes despite asking and getting a response on the lines of "please don't touch my stuff, I like it the way it is").

Planned obsolescence is already a thing.

Wait till they apply this to people.

You're absolutely right, of course.

It's still weird because it puts off customers buying Skype credits in the first place, and getting credit from your customers is pretty great.

Same logic with gift cards. If I have 50 real dollars that never expire, why would the $50 card you spend it on expire?

The marketing that has convinced us gift cards are appropriate while cash / cheques are not is impressive.

Here in Canada gift cards do not expire (IIRC there is a law against it). Is this not the case elsewhere?

I know myself and many other people prefer gift cards because it forces you to buy something for yourself instead of just adding it to the savings account. It shows slightly more thought than just hard cash as well.

They don't expire in California either, but they can in other states.

Having had this happen to me (and not realize it until later), I can say that purhasing new credits keeps your old credits in pergatory.

They neither remind you that "hey, you have credits, dont purchase more!" and they happily spend your new credits to hope none the wiser.

I imagine this was all for doing some creative accounting to pump up their books.