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Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

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Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You compare it to slack, of all things?

What am I supposed to be comparing it to? Something I don't use on a daily basis?

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#132
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…

"Skype for Business" is not Skype, it is a re-brand of the Messenger tool they already had. It is super obvious once you start dealing with the API.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#134

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" -…

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…

I feel compelled reiterate to the world how astonishingly bad Teams is. We've been using it since its release and some days I'm convinced that there must be some internal management issue causing employees to deliberately sabotage the product.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#135
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…

If that's the nail in the coffin then why is skype still popular? The voice/video/screen share performance is consistently always bad, to the level of unusable.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#137
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...

We mostly switched to Zoom due the call quality.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#138

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.

Take calls directly from GV with Hangsouts dialer app on your smartphone. Or port the number to Twilio, callwithus.com, CallCentric, flowroute.com, VoIP.ms and use a SIP soft phone or physical IP phone or ATA. Bets solution for you depends on what physical device you want to use and ease of SMS integration

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#139
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...

Skype for Business client and server both seem to work pretty well. What I find annoying is Microsoft conflating the branding between two very different products, a rebadged enterprise communications product (formerly Lync) and a commercial-consumer product. So when someone says they want to make a Skype call with a client, what do they mean? Sometimes it's Skype for Business and sometimes it's plain old Skype. It co…

In theory it is possible to make calls from Skype for Business and Skype for Consumers. In practice the UI for that is quite horrible and I could never successfully connect a call.
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