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Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

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Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#51

Post by std_throwaway »

kuschku wrote: post #41
std_throwaway wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how software can get this much worse. Having done absolutely nothing would have left Skype in a better shape than what we have now. What did they do with it? Do they not regression test? Are they letting each new intern add a new feature while nobody really cares about quality? Did they just replace the old software with a new bug-riddled software that's getting pushed out the door without quality…

They switched from P2P to a hosted model because suddenly CGNATs showed up everywhere on the internet with no way through them.

Wouldn't a central proxy service as fallback be enough then?

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#52

Post by jacquesm »

kuschku wrote: post #41
std_throwaway wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how software can get this much worse. Having done absolutely nothing would have left Skype in a better shape than what we have now. What did they do with it? Do they not regression test? Are they letting each new intern add a new feature while nobody really cares about quality? Did they just replace the old software with a new bug-riddled software that's getting pushed out the door without quality…

They switched from P2P to a hosted model because suddenly CGNATs showed up everywhere on the internet with no way through them.

Skype was excellent at traversing all kinds of firewalls, in fact that made them the market leader.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#53

Post by StreamBright »

binarymax wrote: post #15

"Microsoft Corp. says the criticism is overblown and reflects, in part, people's grumpiness with software updates." Denial is the first stage of acceptance. Not sure how long the full cycle takes for a company as large as Microsoft, but Skype is dead.

I think it would take an hour to create a list of broken features with Skype. Denying wont help MS, alternatives will show up and people and business will move over. They could avoid this just by listening to the users, but instead they bullshit about it "criticism is overblown". Well done.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#54

Post by pbhjpbhj »

std_throwaway wrote: post #37
Jun8 wrote: post #5

"Since acquiring Skype from private equity investors, Microsoft has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market, a change that has made Skype less intuitive and harder to use ..." This is absolutely not the bulk of the problem: simply put, the call quality is horrendous and dropping calls in the middle of the meeting is quite common. Modus operandi in most Skype conference calls in our company is to…

I don't understand how software can get this much worse. Having done absolutely nothing would have left Skype in a better shape than what we have now. What did they do with it? Do they not regression test? Are they letting each new intern add a new feature while nobody really cares about quality? Did they just replace the old software with a new bug-riddled software that's getting pushed out the door without quality…

Based on recent Linux updates (but not the most recent, it's become unusable for contacting family) I think they let each new intern remove a feature.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#55

Post by seanalltogether »

Does anyone have a recommendation for taking USA calls in another country other than through skype? I currently have google voice forward to a skype number that i lease from them. I use google voice for texting friends back home, and skype to make the calls. If I could take skype out of this equation or move texting and calls to just one platform that would be great.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#56

Post by erikb »

std_throwaway wrote: post #37
Jun8 wrote: post #5

"Since acquiring Skype from private equity investors, Microsoft has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market, a change that has made Skype less intuitive and harder to use ..." This is absolutely not the bulk of the problem: simply put, the call quality is horrendous and dropping calls in the middle of the meeting is quite common. Modus operandi in most Skype conference calls in our company is to…

I don't understand how software can get this much worse. Having done absolutely nothing would have left Skype in a better shape than what we have now. What did they do with it? Do they not regression test? Are they letting each new intern add a new feature while nobody really cares about quality? Did they just replace the old software with a new bug-riddled software that's getting pushed out the door without quality…

Always when you hear the word "Enterprise" and it's not related to Star Trek it usually means "company that has made it so far and so stable up on the food chain that from now on they don't need to work hard anymore". If you have never worked in Enterprise software development, think about putting 100 first semester students into a room full of drugs and costumes and then letting them act "professional".

What do you think happens if you hand over a relatively well developed software to such a team? Now let a few years pass and you have today's Skype.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#57

Post by StreamBright »

hitekker wrote: post #17

For business, just use Zoom. A few months ago I fired it up after years of neglect and— wow— the client connected to the meeting no update required. Now that’s software built for the future.

Same, I actually moved companies to used Zoom just by showing them how easy it is to do everything with it. The mobile clients are prime example of great mobile software. I can do confcalls for hours while my batter does not drain. I need to charge my phone after 1 hour of Skype call.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#59

Post by bigdubs »

jacquesm wrote: post #49
Jun8 wrote: post #5

"Since acquiring Skype from private equity investors, Microsoft has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market, a change that has made Skype less intuitive and harder to use ..." This is absolutely not the bulk of the problem: simply put, the call quality is horrendous and dropping calls in the middle of the meeting is quite common. Modus operandi in most Skype conference calls in our company is to…

This is a direct consequence of Skype going from a peer-to-peer model where the servers were just used during call set-up to a far more centralized model. I stopped using Skype shortly after Microsoft acquired it and started streaming all calls through their DC, I could see no other reason than surveillance for it.

It's actually the other way around. "SuperNodes" (elective service as a kind of hub) caused lots of dropped calls and flaky connections because people were trying to do it on bad home connections.

Microsoft switched to centralized servers to _increase_ call quality.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#60

Post by std_throwaway »

gambiting wrote: post #18
mnkypete wrote: post #4

Um.. I'm not sure the article author is familiar with the fact that "Skype for business" (the "complex" one) is actually home grown and was just rebranded from Lync. This is not at all the same as the consumer Skype, which actually tries to be a weird mixup between Snapchat and whatnot at the moment (failing utterly of course). Skype for Business (+ PSTN calling) is actually pretty great on Office 365 tbh...

I work at a large corporation where we use Skype For Business and I swear, this is probably the worst piece of software I have ever used. They can't get basic things right - I can send a message to my coworker right now, and it will appear in the list of messages on his machine somewhere in between past messages. For a while, we had someone who couldn't receive any attachments, skype would just say "failed sending" -…

To be fair, if you just mess with the registry and corrupt it, you should expect weird problems.
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