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Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

bloomberg.com

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Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#101

Post by kalleboo »

ivraatiems wrote: post #25

Consumer Skype isn't just awful for calling, it's also awful as even a basic chat client now. Recent mobile updates have made it much, much harder to use and began prioritizing a SnapChat-style "stories" feature that nobody asked for or wanted, because there's already an app for that called SnapChat. I switched from Skype to Discord, as did pretty much everyone I know. It has all the same features Skype used to have…

I've seen a lot of bizarre app pivots in my day, but the VoIP-to-Snapchat clone pivot is by far the strangest. There is no planet on which it makes sense.

We also switched to Discord, which is kind of crazy if you think of it. An app for gamers working better for work than a Microsoft VoIP app.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#102

Post by Kliment »

kome wrote: post #34

The article is about "Skype for Business". But let's talk about the Skype for consumers. They transformed a nice software in one of the most clunky and unusable and frustrating experiences ever. The UI is just that broken. The thing is that try to follow all the last shitty trends of development and webdesign, and the results are absolutely horrible. The new Skype "electron"-like interface for MacOS is the worst UI I…

This is a good time to mention ghetto-skype [1] which makes it semi-usable again. https://github.com/stanfieldr/ghetto-skype

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#103

Post by ksherlock »

kome wrote: post #34

The article is about "Skype for Business". But let's talk about the Skype for consumers. They transformed a nice software in one of the most clunky and unusable and frustrating experiences ever. The UI is just that broken. The thing is that try to follow all the last shitty trends of development and webdesign, and the results are absolutely horrible. The new Skype "electron"-like interface for MacOS is the worst UI I…

I deleted it and reverted to an older pre-electron version. The one-page HTML user interface is painful to use. I just want to make cheap phone calls, not join a social network. Socialism sucks.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#104

Post by erikb »

noonespecial wrote: post #71
erikb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>putting 100 first semester students into a room full of drugs and costumes and then letting them act "professional". That had to be the most succinct description of the corporate work environment I've ever encountered. I'm shamelessly stealing that. Well said.

no problem, CC-BY-SA.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#105

Post by BuckRogers »

I was recently looking for a PC-to-PC only text chat program to use between my computer and my wife's. We text using iMessage otherwise. Part of the requirement was to be able to see when the other person was online/away. The latest Skype is terrible, along with basically every other Windows10 chat program available today. I can't tell if companies are trying to hide when their contacts are online/offline in order to encourage constant engagement with the app or if it's just a broken design.

I just needed a simple program that just worked, like AIM & MSN were. We ended up settling on an old standby, Trillian. It's one of the few that works as I'd expect one to. I don't use it on my phone but it syncs a lot better between devices too.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#106

Post by wetpaws »

jacquesm wrote: post #52
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.

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

This. You could spend days setting up port forwarding and tunneling for some game, but you could always be sure Skype will find some loophole and just work out of the box.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#107

Post by Fnoord »

yiyus wrote: post #32
ajross wrote: post #3

Skype would have been destroyed at this point by Google and Apple and Facebook. Platform integration always wins over early movers once the giants catch up technologically. The real story is that MS wildly overpaid for a brand that they couldn't leverage and that they didn't need to target the corporate market where "Skype" (which isn't actually Skype, just rebranded MS code!) is doing well.

At least in Europe, Skype is actually being replaced by WhatsApp, so I do not think platform integration is the main issue.

Not only WhatsApp, but mainly WhatsApp. Telegram has a small, devout userbase and the gaming community has largely migrated to Discord.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#108

Post by boxingdog »

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...

That is not my experience with Skype for business before at one company we used Lync at that worked perfectly, then we moved to Skype and the problems began, from people not able to share their screens, bad sound quality, people getting dropped from the calls, etc. it was painful to use. At another company sending messages was a gamble, sometimes they were delivered and a lot of times just a "failed to send", so we had to resort to communicating by email, some coworkers created a slack channel and then in lest than a month the entire company was there.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#110

Post by ino »

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…

Desktop skype has also enabled a sound volume limiter or background filter that's awful and for that reason alone we still use an older skype version.
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