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Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

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Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#91

Post by cakes »

bigdubs wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can understand this rationale technically, when I was using skype (at work) ~8years ago we would have some real problems and a lot of it was attributed to "SuperNodes" if you dug deep down far enough. Chat and group chats at the time, though, were very reasonable

Whether that improved quality or not, I wouldn't know, I haven't used skype in quite some time.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#92

Post by bambax »

> “It was the biggest asset in the space at the time with the most recognized brand,” says Lori Wright (...) Focusing on corporations was a reasonable strategy...

The value of the Skype brand was with the consumer market! Microsoft doesn't need a new strong brand (other than its own) to go after corporations...??!?

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#94

Post by hedora »

std_throwaway wrote: post #51
kuschku wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They used to do this. Now, WebRTC supports it in a standardized way, which has created a long list of competing services. :-)

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#95

Post by typon »

fhood wrote: post #45
gambiting wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" -…

I can not agree with you more. Skype for business has is an unmitigated disaster of a piece of software and whatever team is in charge of it needs to be fired or relocated so that Microsoft can start over on it. Skype for business is so insultingly bad that it is pretty much the only piece of widely used software that I am willing to claim that given a month I could write something far better.

Somehow it is WORSE than Microsoft Office communicator we used to use at my company.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#96

Post by kalleboo »

zenbob wrote: post #6

Am I the only one who thought pre-Microsoft skype was a poorly-functioning product?

It was poorly-functioning, but all the alternatives were far worse. Just the fact that Skype would always connect despite double-NAT and broken UDP and god knows what seemed magic at the time.

Now Skype has gotten even worse (their "Snapchat" UI is completely unusable), and the alternatives have gotten better.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#97

Post by ropeadopepope »

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…

> the call quality is horrendous and dropping calls in the middle of the meeting is quite common.

And yet, it's better than everything else I've tried. My team uses slack screen share every day and nearly every day we need to switch to skype for other team members to see the screen share.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#98

Post by wilde »

stephenhuey wrote: post #12
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 do not understand why a software company who has long made money in the enterprise with Office, SQL Server, etc cannot make an integrated chat program that works well in a corporate environment. This Lync Skype beast is so buggy and it doesn't even have code paste one tenth as decent as what Sametime had a decade ago, and MS makes TOOLS FOR DEVELOPERS! Do they not use Lync/Skype in-house? Dog-folding should make it…

They use it internally. It’s equally shitty, but it makes enough money no one cares.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#99

Post by Someone1234 »

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" -…

Skype for Business is actually being deprecated and replaced with Microsoft Teams[0].

Microsoft Teams is impressive that it actually manages to have a worse desktop client than Skype for Business, and the web site is barely any better. If people on O365 haven't used it, they should since Microsoft will force it on you sooner or later.

It is like Microsoft wanted to clone a bunch of popular services (e.g. Slack) and just mashed them all together without a care in the world, and to top it off had to make a bad UWP desktop application that needed touch support so they cut 90% of common features to fit in enough voidspace into the UI for touch.

[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/faq-journey

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#100

Post by hedora »

tytytytytytytyt wrote: post #67
bigdubs wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Then why did quality drop so much?

I find the CADT development model is surprisingly good at explaining most software engineering trainwrecks these days: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
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