They switched from P2P to a hosted model because suddenly CGNATs showed up everywhere on the internet with no way through them.
There's widespread speculation that they moved away from P2P because it made it harder for the NSA to wiretap, which the NSA gained the ability to do right before the acquisition[0]. Keep in mind I did say speculation, but the NSA definitely seems to have gained increase ease at wiretapping Skype in early 2011 which is also when Microsoft was negotiating/purchasing Skype. From [0]: > "Sustained Skype collection began…
Direct connections for audio or video calls are a patented ‘invention’ that is why the major vendors like Microsoft and also Apple changed to server based communication.
"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.
Same reason people are on LinkedIn, FB, etc. I don't switch because all the people in my call list are on Skype. Also, I don't have any smartphone, only PC and laptop, so I don't even know or care what kind of apps for iOS or Android there are. ON teh PC I have to use "Skype Classic", which MS would like to get rid of (default download is the app for Windows 10). That app is unusable, and I'm tempted to add "literally" for emphasis but I'll wait until this new meaning of this word is (even) more established and the original one more forgotten :-) For example, in the app I can't even control my online status unless I keep the app open, while old Desktop-Skype lets me choose the status and I can close the window but the service remains available through the taskbar icon. I'm also unable to see a list of my contacts filtered by who is online in the app, which I consider to be as basic as it gets.
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…
I couldn't agree with this more! What really characterizes 'enterprise software' is that the people selecting and buying it are different people than the people who have to use it.
'enterprise software' is sold to stove-pipe organizations. It can be all sorts of awful for the people who actually have to use it, as long as the people making the purchasing decision come out of the deal looking good. The software vendor isn't set up to be able to iterate and improve based on customer feedback, and their customers aren't set up to be able to offer that feedback. Hence 'enterprise software' remains in a perpetual state of awfulness and anything good about it is purely accidental.
>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.
"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…
Honestly, at least from my experience, 4-5 minutes is lucky. What I see is more like 15 minutes, regardless of the technology. Skype, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect, it's all confusing and hard to use for non-tech participants who aren't experienced with it.
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...
Aside: I can't hear the name "Skype for Business" without thinking someone took a perfectly suitable chat client and attacked it with Kragle.
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 used O365 and Skype for Business at my previous job, and we regularly fell back on consumer Skype with some of our remote developers (not that remote mind you, within Europe). Teams seemed to work better but was still very bare at the time.
Then we got new C-level executives from Cisco, and the first thing they did was to initiate a migration to Cisco solutions. Their offering is super confusing to end users like me (WebEx, Spark, Jabber, ?) but it works reliably, in my experience.
"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…
Agree. It reminds me of Microsoft's defense of Windows 8, "people are just struggling to adjust to something that's new". Whereas internally they were aware that their UX sucked, the OEM all told them the UX sucked, and they fired the head of the Windows division.
Firing the head of the Windows division came late in the game. From what I’ve heard, critizing the UX was a great way to ruin your annual performance reviews (and get fired).
The current version of skype is rife with usability problems, they dropped a lot of key things since the last major version... - The mute/unmute button hides itself, even when your mouse pointer is ready and waiting right over top of it (to click when it's your turn to speak) - To add more kick to the nuts, they also apparently removed the mute/unmute shortcut key - Screen shares dim when your mouse is over them - If…