LOS ANGELES (AP) — Jimmy Johnson, the Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who won two Super Bowls and a college national championship, announced his retirement from Fox Sports on Monday after being part of its NFL coverage for most of the network’s 31 years.

The 81-year-old Johnson made the announcement during an appearance on “The Herd With Colin Cowherd.”

“The most fun I ever had in my career, that’s counting Super Bowls and national championships, was at Fox Sports,” he said, adding that he loved working for CEO Eric Shanks and Fox NFL Sunday producer Bill Richards.

“But I’ve made an extremely difficult decision,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it for the last four or five years and I’ve decided to retire from Fox. I’m going to miss it. I’m going to miss all the guys. I’ll see them occasionally. It’s been a great run starting 31 years ago.”

Johnson worked alongside hosts Curt Menefee and Terry Bradshaw and analysts Howie Long and Michael Strahan. Johnson did two stints with Fox totaling 25 years. He was hired for the pregame show in 1994 and spent two seasons before leaving to become the general manager and head coach of the Miami Dolphins in 1996.

Johnson was with the Dolphins for five seasons and returned to Fox in 2002.

“Jimmy Johnson was there when Fox NFL Sunday came on-air for the first time 31 years ago, and since then has been a cherished member of our Fox Sports family, which makes today’s retirement news bittersweet,” Shanks said in a statement posted to social media. “Jimmy served as an inspiration to generations of football fans with his legendary swagger, one-of-a-kind insight and signature humor.”

Johnson made the cross-country trip weekly during the season for many years from his home in Key West, Florida, to Los Angeles. In recent seasons, he would only to travel to Los Angeles for the Sundays when Fox had a doubleheader and would work the other weeks from home.

“We caught lightning in a bottle. Chemistry is hard to forecast and duplicate. We came out of the gate at number one and it’s been that way for 31 years,” Long said Monday by phone. “We’ve grown to love one another. And the thing I go back to is what I said to him as he were walking off the field (at the Super Bowl). I’ve never seen him this happy.”

Menefee said Johnson informed him last week about his decision. Menefee added that two years ago the crew had what was thought to be a going-away dinner for Johnson in Los Angeles at the end of the season, but that Johnson later opted to return.

“The reason he did decide to come back before was because there was a hesitation. This time he was 100 percent confident that this is the right thing for him to do at this time and with his family,” Menefee said by phone. “I think we all hope we get to go out into the sunset the way that we want, and he certainly has been able to do that.”

Johnson won Super Bowls with the Dallas Cowboys in the 1992 and ’93 seasons and the college football national championship with Miami in 1987. He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2020.

Menefee said the announcement of Johnson’s induction during halftime of an NFC divisional-round game in January 2020 remains one of the top moments since Fox Sports began carrying the NFL in 1994.

“I don’t think there’s anything that we have done in the 31 years of Fox Sports has been remotely close to that, because I think not only did it mean so much to Jimmy, you saw how much it meant to the people who care about Jimmy,” Menefee said. “I think everything that Fox Sports is got encapsulated in that one moment for the whole world to see.”

Johnson coached the Cowboys for five seasons, stepping down after winning his second Lombardi Trophy, and three months later was hired by Fox as a pregame show analyst. Johnson’s split with Cowboys owner Jerry Jones was acrimonious, and it wasn’t until Dec. 30, 2023, that Jones put Johnson in the team’s ring of honor. Johnson and Tom Landry are the only coaches alongside the 19 players and two executives in the exclusive group of one of the NFL’s storied franchises.

Johnson’s coaching career started in 1965 as an assistant at Louisiana Tech, Bradshaw’s alma mater. He became a head coach for the first time in 1979, at Oklahoma State, and left after five years for Miami, where he went 52-9 with two No. 2 finishes to go with his 1987 title.

“It has been 17 seasons of fun and laughs sitting next to you,” Strahan posted on X. “You’re truly one of a kind and thanks for being you and gifting me with one of the best friendships anyone could ever ask for. Hope you enjoy fishing and drinking beers on the boat. You deserve it, love you Coach!”

Johnson reposted Strahan’s well wishes and added a message: “Michael, going to miss sitting next to you but I’ll be watching.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Microsoft is closing down Skype, the video-calling service it bought for $8.5 billion in 2011, which had helped spark a transformation in how people communicate online.

The tech giant said Friday it will retire Skype in May and shift some of its services to Microsoft Teams, its flagship videoconferencing and team applications platform. Skype users will be able to use their existing accounts to log into Teams.

Microsoft has for years prioritized Teams over Skype and the decision to fold the brand reflects the tech giant’s desire to streamline its main communications app as it faces a host of competitors.

Founded in 2003 by a group of engineers in Tallinn, Estonia, Skype was a pioneer in making telephone calls using the internet instead of landlines. It relied on VOIP, voice over internet protocol, technology that converts audio into a digital signal transmitted online. Skype added video calls after online retailer eBay bought the service in 2005.

“You no longer had to be a senior manager in a Fortune 500 company to have a good quality video call with someone else,” said Barbara Larson, a management professor at Northeastern University who studies the history of virtual and remote work. “It brought a lot of people around the world closer.”

The ability to bypass expensive international phone calls to connect with far-flung coworkers was a boon for startups, but also people outside of the business world.

“You could suddenly have long calls, frequent calls, that were either free or very inexpensive,” Larson said. As with other new platforms, scammers also made use of it.

By 2011, when Microsoft bought it from eBay, Skype had about 170 million users worldwide, then-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in an event announcing the planned merger.

“The Skype brand has become a verb, nearly synonymous with video and voice communications,” Ballmer said at the time.

Skype was still considered high-tech in 2017 when recently inaugurated President Donald Trump’s administration used it to field questions from journalists far from the White House press briefing room. It was a month later when Microsoft launched Teams, an attempt to catch up to the growing demand for workplace chatting services sparked by upstart rival Slack Technologies.

Slack and Teams, along with newer video platforms such as Zoom, saw explosive growth during the COVID-19 pandemic as companies scrambled to shift to remote work, and even families and friends looked for new tools for virtual gatherings. Skype, by then, was already on the wane but had paved the way for strengthening the connections people can build remotely.

“Higher-quality media can really deepen relationships and make people able to work through complex problems much better,” Larson said. “Suddenly, this was available to anyone with a decent internet connection. And that was the real sort of revolutionary role that Skype had.”