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New Skype Update Is Horrible

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171–180 of 334 posts

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#171

Post by chrisper »

Meekro wrote: post #10

What could I switch to (on both Mac and PC) that would give me better video chat functionality? Edit: Just to clarify, here's what I'm looking for: 1. Free plan; available everywhere in the world (I have family outside the US). 2. Both Mac and PC clients that are actually good. 3. Video chat quality (including noise filtering and such) that matches or exceeds what Skype can do. 4. IM-like client that supports text, v…

I usually use Facebook Messenger Video Call when talking to my parents. It works okay most of the time.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#172

Post by apapli »

eigenvector wrote: post #138
muppetman wrote: post #34

Microsoft have driven Skype into the ground. How they can release something this childish and terrible, yet also have the "Skype for Business" brand I don't understand. If this had been released as "Skype for Fun" or "Skype for Kids" I'd almost understand. But trying to force users into this hideous mess is very frustrating, Skype was a dependable, if bloated app. Now I fear getting messages via it, it's so horrible.…

Both my employer (120,000 employees) and our main contractor (20,000 employees) use Skype for Business. By use, I mean we've purchased it and deployed it to every employee in the world. It's never worked, ever, for anything. Not for audio, not for screen sharing, not for chat. I now decline all meeting requests that rely on Skype for Business for some essential part of the meeting.

We are a 40 person organisation and use S4B via our Office365 subscription. It works perfectly.

That said, being in Australia we don't have Microsoft-provided telephony in it, nor do we have any requirement for hunt groups and so forth. All our staff use their mobiles to talk, so Skype is purely used for teleconferences and video chats.

Enterprise telephony is a weird space right now - Microsoft ought to emerge the winner eventually with their broader stack proposition, especially when compared with most other vendors that try to stick in their bloatware or poorly written software. But gee it is a painful and slow transition to observe from the sidelines.

Just my 2c. :)

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#174

Post by ouid »

Bud wrote: post #126
makecheck wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is probably going to be a problem that next-generation lawmakers have to solve: how to force entities to distinguish between different types of changes, and be liable for sticking to that set. Just like it’s ridiculous to let installers run as root without a sandbox, it should be considered ridiculous that we can’t constrain updaters: I should be able to say “bug fixes only” or whatever, and see only that happen…

Wait. You actually think that individual consumers should be able to, essentially, construct their own unique snowflake version of an app which only fixes bugs but retains the UI (and god knows what other code) from an arbitrary previous version? Look, I don't like some of these stupid updates either, but that idea is completely unworkable.

Are you arguing that backend/frontend isn't a valid abstraction? For web apps, UI is never anything more than a suggestion. It's not unworkable for the web.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#175

Post by knolan »

Funnily enough I can track my relationship with my partner with Skype's history. When we were doing the long distance thing and she was still on dial up we managed to use Skype just barely. It was able to route around the University firewall because of its port randomisation. It was a resource hog that likes to set its CPU affinity to high but it worked.

Then it slowly got worse and worse. We both used Skype to talk to our parents and spent most of that time fixing issues related to Skype not working or explaining the latest daft UI redesign.

Nowadays everyone but her parents are on Apple devices and a FaceTime just works and every visit to their place involves fixing Skype and explaining to them about the clusterfuck that is Skype on Windows 8/10.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#176

Post by riffic »

Bud wrote: post #131
riffic wrote: post #83

Skype has always been an example of garbage software: https://stallman.org/skype.html

Not at all true. That article is only from a few years ago. The era when Skype was quite good was more like 7-12 years ago.

"quite good" means different things to different people. For those who care about certain issues, Skype has been objectively bad for certain reasons as listed here:

https://blog.grobox.de/2009/ten-reasons-why-you-should-boyco...

In other words, Skype has always been garbage.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#177

Post by komali2 »

viraptor wrote: post #65
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...Has Hangouts ever been good? Like, I totally get complaining about Skype. The P2P stuff caused it to be kinda wonky. But your choice for "better" is Hangouts? Between the five or six alternative Google chat offerings, the attempts to merge it with the dialer and SMS apps, the cutting out of the online/offline statuses. Google Talk was great though, back in the day.

You don't really have to care what's going on in the wider Google ecosystem. Google hangouts (talk before) pretty much changed the name once. That's it. As far as desktop experience goes there are no alternative offerings. Just ignore the mobile mess.

>You don't really have to care what's going on in the google ecosystem

That isn't true, we've been burned before by choosing the "wrong" google product. For example, I was using Hangouts to handle SMS texting from my Google Voice number. Turns out I chose "wrong" because now Hangouts is not to be used for SMS (though it still "works") and there is no way to move my 3 years of conversation history from Hangouts to the "right" app (Google Voice, I guess).

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#178

Post by faho »

davidf18 wrote: post #95
faho wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You and everyone you want to chat with.

Use FaceTime when you can. A lot of people have iPhones and many these days now have Macs.

>A lot of people have iPhones and many these days now have Macs.

Not really here in Germany. iOS has about 20% of the market, Android the other 80%.

macOS is at about 8%.

Anecdotally, even discounting that I have neither, of the 20 or so people I'd realistically want to chat with (friends and family), two have iPhones and one has a mac.

Plus: What happens when they switch? Or when I want to switch?

Also, I don't really want to use multiple applications.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#179

Post by user5994461 »

eigenvector wrote: post #138
muppetman wrote: post #34

Microsoft have driven Skype into the ground. How they can release something this childish and terrible, yet also have the "Skype for Business" brand I don't understand. If this had been released as "Skype for Fun" or "Skype for Kids" I'd almost understand. But trying to force users into this hideous mess is very frustrating, Skype was a dependable, if bloated app. Now I fear getting messages via it, it's so horrible.…

Both my employer (120,000 employees) and our main contractor (20,000 employees) use Skype for Business. By use, I mean we've purchased it and deployed it to every employee in the world. It's never worked, ever, for anything. Not for audio, not for screen sharing, not for chat. I now decline all meeting requests that rely on Skype for Business for some essential part of the meeting.

I use audio calls, video calls or screen sharing almost every day.

It works flawlessly and I despise every company that doesn't have Linq/Skype.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#180

Post by tajen »

userbinator wrote: post #133
muppetman wrote: post #34

Microsoft have driven Skype into the ground. How they can release something this childish and terrible, yet also have the "Skype for Business" brand I don't understand. If this had been released as "Skype for Fun" or "Skype for Kids" I'd almost understand. But trying to force users into this hideous mess is very frustrating, Skype was a dependable, if bloated app. Now I fear getting messages via it, it's so horrible.…

We're all upset, but Microsoft isn't going to roll back an upgrade/decision of this magnitude. Not unless there is sufficient opposition --- and by "sufficient", I mean almost everyone refusing to upgrade or suddenly moving to an alternative. Flashy dumbed-down UIs seem to be the "modern" trend now. I hope it starts going back in the other direction, but sadly I doubt that will happen...

I can't recall any software company who rolled back an upgrade. UI upgrades take a lot of resources and overhaul, they're also UX-tested, involve marketing ops, etc: If they haven't got the message before, companies prefer to risk dying than cancelling their attempt to pivot.

Look at Ubuntu's Unity. Apple's emoji bar. Microsoft's Windows 8.1 tiles.

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