111–120 of 436 posts
Statements like these only obfuscate the real problem, that is, Microsoft simply doesn't give a flying fuck about usability and user experience. In their eyes, ease of use is not a product feature that you can charge someone for.
- VoIP for groups
- Built-in screen sharing
- Chat/messenger
- One-click voice calls without the need to switch off camera every time (looking at you Hangouts Meet)
- The ability to call or conference in a phone number.
- Built-in file transfer
- Free :)
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" -…
I mean, they tout GE, a company in the middle of an incredibly well documented and historically expensive failure of a transition to a "digital" company. Probably not the best example. You'll have millions of minutes spent in Skype to wave around when getting everyone actually able to hear and participate takes several minutes on top of every meeting and call.
Right now we've got Slack, WebEx, and SfB. SfB is by far, the worst experience of the 3. Big meetings are on WebEx, and pretty much everyone uses Slack for ad-hoc stuff now. SfB is just too damned painful.
The program has awful UI/UX, calls rarely work, connectivity is a dice-roll most days, copy/paste(this is 2018, come on) is hilariously bad, viewing any kind of cohesive chat history is a disaster.
It's pretty bad when a recently added feature(calls) to an Electron-based chat app already provides a better UX vs. a multi-year incumbent created expressly for the same purpose.
Another comment summed it up pretty well: "enterprise" software has become synonymous with "stopped trying".
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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.
I don't consider removing superfluous features a bad thing as long as the core features are working flawlessly. EDIT: Apparently they removed really useful features which is a bad development.
Update: Wow so many upvotes, someone should create a webrtc startup.
I bought an Xbox One with Kinect just to use Skype with my family. The good quality camera and mic, and the ability to have everyone gather around on the sofa and see each other on the TV made it seem worth it. After the "upgrade" to the unified Windows app a few months back, we've given up and are now using Hangouts on our phones. That's how bad it is. Counterintuitive design, hard to use with media remote, unreliab…
a) Any semi-affordable, braindead easy to use, consumer product or something a person can rig up for good quality family-sitting-on-the-couch video conferencing, with good quality and reliable audio and video?
b) A multi-platform Skype alternative that can call land lines?
This is what Skype should be. Google and Amazon both have popular home consumer devices, I would imagine Microsoft would love to be a big player in that market, and yet their best entry candidate for that (in that they could probably get tons of users early) is Skype, which they seem determined to destroy with absolutely insanely destructive UI changes.
Satya has done an absolutely incredible job at changing so many Microsoft divisions around, yet Skype continues to get worse, it seems absolutely surreal to me.
"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.
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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 j…
-200MB minimum memory usage whether you use the desktop app or in a browser. Usually much more
-Animated GIFs animate FOREVER with no way to turn them off, except by turning them off for everyone in your entire organization
-Attachments fail constantly
-Randomly takes over your SfB chats/calls
-Can't have more than 19 people in a chat channel at once
-Bots only work in the unintuitive, threaded "Teams" part that no one seems to grok, not the chat part that everyone actually uses
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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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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.
The peers aren't moving themselves to the DC to sit on their calls.