Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#201

Post by jmuguy » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:21 PM UTC

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" -…

If you really want to torture yourself, try SfB on macOS. "Kafkaesque" is an apt term for all the truly bizarre ways it abuses you.

My favorite recent thing - I'll hang up a call and randomly SfB will spawn about a dozen call quality survey windows for every call I've recently completed.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#202

Post by dragandj » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:23 PM UTC

BuckRogers wrote: post #105

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…

You might find Telegram incredibly useful for what you describe.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#203

Post by godzillabrennus » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:25 PM UTC

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…

It takes a few minutes to handshake each users connection with the NSA to be recorded. Call quality was better when it was peer to peer and not routed through a Central Intelligence Agency.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#204

Post by Klathmon » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:26 PM UTC

DrPhish wrote: post #117

Someone1234 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 agree completely with your assessment. I used to gripe about SfB, but Teams is hilariously bad. Off the top of my head: -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 -Ca…

- Has their own poorly written markdown-WYSIWYG hibrid thing that often puts what i'm writing into some state where I need to clear out the whole message and start over.

- Butchers 2-factor auth on mobile and often puts you into a neverending authentication loop (sending tens of text messages if your second factor is setup like that)

- notifications that never clear unless you click on the channel, scroll to the "unread" message, and wait for a few seconds.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#205

Post by winrid » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:29 PM UTC

std_throwaway wrote: post #37

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…

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…

I know people that work on the Skype team. They don't write unit tests for example, "because we sell code not tests". So maybe that gives a clue.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#206

Post by tshibley » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

newsat13 wrote: post #153

_rpd wrote: post #127

I just use Google Hangout. Microsoft Skype has become bloated adware.

Sorry to break it to you, but Hangouts is dead.

This hasn't been my experience at all. I've been interviewing for internships back in the US while studying abroad this winter/spring, and basically everything has been done over hangouts (since I don't have international calling).

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#207

Post by braythwayt » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:30 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #188

braythwayt wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusing, but the issues with Enterprise Software are far more complex than that. Having spent my career working with Enterprises of one sort or another, here are a few off the top of my head: 1. You are not the customer. With ad-driven products, we have painfully realized that if we aren't paying, we aren't the customer, and when something seems awful to us, the explanation often lies in the fact that the thing that…

>their needs are subordinate to the needs of the individuals and departments who are actually paying for it. Are you implying people are paying for dropped calls and poor performance as a feature?

I'm implying that sometimes, "Improve ability to handle scale as measured by X improvement in dropped calls and Y improvement in user-reported call quality" is always going to be in the backlog, but it is probably being starved by other initiatives like "Support integration with BigClient Internal System Z."

That's a scenario where the needs of the people making and receiving calls are subordinate to the needs of the people paying for Skype.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#208

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:33 PM UTC

kalleboo wrote: post #101

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.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#209

Post by VladimirGolovin » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:34 PM UTC

wittekm wrote: post #121

Skype for Android is unbelievably bad. I uninstalled it after the following: - a spam bot texts me asking to connect - which, whatever. - my locked phone wakes up from sleep and /launches into Skype/ to show me this exciting information - it literally could be solved by a notification - it is not configurable in settings I can understand the "bypass lock screen" behavior for an incoming phone call, but this is such a…

Earlier today, I wanted to call a friend via Skype (on Android), but I couldn't -- tapping the call icon did nothing. At all. I tried several times, even restarted the app, but it still didn't work.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#210

Post by tbourne » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:35 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #56

std_throwaway wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think the issue here is that when Microsoft purchased Skype and decided to fold it into their Office product, the customer fundamentally changed. They used the market share of the name to carry the product to a new customer base. Unfortunately the existing customer base was alienated.

This definitely isn't the first time (and won't be the last) this has happened in the industry. It's always sad when it does, but it also always opens a door for a new company to create a product that fills the void.