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New Skype Update Is Horrible

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Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#261

Post by untog »

nailer wrote: post #169
pveierland wrote: post #66

My worst Skype annoyance was when they seized your purchased credits if your account was left unused for 180 days. As a sporadic user of Skype when I needed to place an international call etc, having purchased credits reset automatically was such a provocation [0]. Every time I have to re-install Skype for some reason, there's always a new regression or dark UX pattern in use. [0] https://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2010/01…

I had a similar experience: Microsoft deleted all my childhood email because I didn't log into hotmail frequently enough. This included the emails I sent to my first love. And the ones she sent me. All gone. Because Microsoft wanted to save some tiny amount of space. I love Microsoft and an writing this on a Surface device now but Christ, that was awful and would make me think twice about using Microsoft online servi…

While I'm sorry for your loss, the idea of a cloud-based email account that doesn't delete your emails is actually pretty damn new.

When Gmail launched one of its main features was the amount of storage space - people were used to having maybe 10MB of mailbox space. Companies competed over that number. It reflects that email was never seen as being permanent, you were expected to clear old emails out, and many services automatically deleted old emails.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#263

Post by sjellis »

owaislone wrote: post #71
crb wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's god-awful about Hangouts, and does the new Hangouts Meet make things better? https://www.blog.google/products/g-suite/meet-the-new-enterp...

Hangouts is a good piece of tech and the has a great UX with minimal UI. The only issues with hangouts are that: 1. It is a resource hog. Laptops spit fire when they run hangouts for more than 10 minutes 2. It can be buggy and unreliable. Almost every 3rd hangout meeting, someone on my team is unable to hear others or is unable to use the mic. Fix can range anything between restarting the computer to killing audio pr…

Yeah, we use Hangouts for daily standups with all of our teams, so we do multi-way calls for several hours every day (mostly macOS actually, but some Windows), and it's consistently reliable for us. We migrated from Skype, which would always become flaky if there were more than four people on a call.

It really is good, at least on Chrome, but I worry that Google will let it stagnate.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#264

Post by ioulian »

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 had a different experience. When we had a project with a team from another country we tried to use Skype. One person couldn't get it to work, so we tried a lot of other software just to have a video call and share the screen.

None of them worked flawlessly, some required to install some software to be able to run inside a browser? The audio on the others didn't work good. The others had bad video quality and massive lag/delay on the screensharing.

We switched back to Skype For Business/Skype (w/ personal account) and it was the best experience for us (except for that one guy :D), also very reliable!

Skype for Business is also quite nice, and doesn't have any bloat. Just call and message.

There was a discussion back here on HN, why nobody has written some good software just to call a client and share your screen. If you have millions of $, why is it so difficult to make a reliable app? I guess you can't get a lot of revenue on free calling software.

A lot of the time we just call the clients landline and use TeamViewer for screensharing. It's like we're still living in 2001...

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#265

Post by mathw »

rasjani wrote: post #189
eigenvector wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worked for company that was bought by MS. During the acquisition period, I was working for 3rd level enterprise support and were main contact for escalation of issues from our OS X users and MS. And yes, it never worked. Higher up guys where patting themselves on the backs for migrating to Lync and now it was So Well Executed while we in the actual client interface where left to deal with abysmal (platinum) support,…

Except in my experience in an organisation forced to transition from Lync to Skype for Business, Lync always worked fairly well (although we only used chat and voice calls), and Skype for Business was wobbly and unreliable. Even though they were theoretically the same product, somewhere in the rebranding they managed to mess up the network behaviour too.

Skype used to be pretty solid, years ago. These days it's just dodgy as heck and moving Lync to be Skype-branded was one of the more baffling decisions I've seen from Microsoft marketing, because none of us thought Skype had any pedigree worth trying to exploit anymore.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#266

Post by mathw »

tajen wrote: post #180
userbinator wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I consider Windows 10 to represent a significant step back from the Windows 8 UI ideas on Microsoft's part. Windows 10 makes a genuine effort to come to a system which can adapt for touch and non-touch UIs, rather than just using the former all the time.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#267

Post by mathw »

ClassyJacket wrote: post #194
m1el wrote: post #184

I might have a complete misunderstanding of the situation, but I see three main explanations: 1) Microsoft has absolutely no interest in Skype being a viable option, and wants Skype users to adopt some other Microsoft product. Why doesn't Microsoft tell Skype users "Well, Skype is done, just use MSN." 2) People responsible for Skype are optimizing for some metrics, which is opposite to user satisfaction. What is that…

"Why doesn't Microsoft tell Skype users "Well, Skype is done, just use MSN." I'm not aware of anything else they have now that could be supposed to replace it? They already did this the other way around. They closed MSN Messenger in 2013, and told everyone to just use Skype. Skype WAS supposed to the their main messaging app now.

Skype certainly is meant to be their main messaging app now. It's their only messaging app now.

The trouble is, they also don't ever seem to have done anything to make it better, and the ongoing saga of native Windows 8 and now Windows 10 Skype clients is face-palmingly awful.

Flagship chat system on flagship platform doesn't even work right... what hope for Android and iOS?

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#268

Post by mathw »

julianz wrote: post #157
derefr wrote: post #18

Question: does Skype for Business (nee Lync) mirror these same UX changes as Skype makes them, or does it do its own thing? Because I'm guessing this is just Microsoft further differentiating their product categories: today's Skype is for consumers (ala Facebook Messenger), so it gets "cute" features at the expense of the ability to use it for productivity; while Skype for Business continues to be about efficient col…

The Business one still looks like MSN Messenger of old, give or take. Unfortunately it has a host of it's own small, annoying bugs. The first chat message of the day routinely appears above yesterday's messages so you don't see it. Emailed "missed conversations" have timestamps that are 8 hours out so you wonder why someone was talking to you in the middle of the night and it turns out it was 10 minutes ago. All of t…

Aaah the "Missed Conversation" things.

I only get those for conversations I didn't miss. Apparently if I don't have the last word, I missed it.

Fortunately my company uses Slack almost 100% for internal business.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#269

Post by cygned »

Using Skype for business communication and I think this update is awful. The new tabs do not make any sense to me - "Highlights"? "Capture"? I cannot see if someone is online from the contact list anymore. Swiping back to close a chat hardly works, most of the time it opens the "Find" tab - where I can find things I don't need. The call screen is confusing (what is difference between "Microphone" and "Headset" anyway?).

Skype does not feel like a serious communication tool anymore.

Re: New Skype Update Is Horrible

#270

Post by oAlbe »

fkistner wrote: post #143
oAlbe wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find Signal video calls to be extremely stable, clear and with a very very good quality. Too bad they don't have a desktop client :/

Well, they do [1], but you are correct in that they currently do not support calls on their desktop client. [1]: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Signal-Desktop

You are right, but I really can't get myself to call a chrome extension "desktop client".
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