Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

Edit: The only thing it doesn't do in your list is call a phone number at the moment. Though, I heard about a bot that can make calls for you not sure if it works.

JWZ redirects referrals from HN to an obscene image.

But sometimes it is a question of different priorities, and I did not mention that above. Good catch.

That said, the true Skype is not as good as it used to be. I kept using version 4.3 on Linux until the servers stopped working with it. The reason is that the new UI is horribly biased towards video calls, which I don't do often and surely not with friends. For them there is WhatsApp since it became available and every single person I know uses it.

Problems with the Skype UI, in case somebody from Microsoft reads these comments. This is version 8.20 Linux, which is a huge improvement over the previous main version (screen sharing works). The use case is talking or chatting with customers, small or medium companies (in the European way so small on the American scale). None of them had Skype for business, many use Slack.

1. When I start a voice call the chat is not opened by default. It should.

2. When I open it, it's a narrow column. The rest of screen is totally wasted. Maybe it's hoping that I start a video call, which I won't because I started a voice one. The chat should fill the screen, Slack like. The is no way to resize the chat, or they made it very difficult to find it.

3. There is a lot of white space around text, which I understand typographically but it doesn't allow me to see much back in the history unless I start scrolling, which I didn't have to. There should be an option for a compact mode. I've been tempted to open the Electron container (a zip), change the CSS, rezip and check if it works.

4. Messages used to have a visible timestamp. They don't have one anymore unless one clicks on them. This makes harder to find when somebody wrote something.

As a consolation, Hangout is possibly worse. The only advantage is that one can share a link to a group chat. Skype can't.

The result is that one customer of mine always used Hangout. Another one switched to Hangout for the group chats and we used TeamViewer when screensharing didn't work in Skype for Linux. I'm the only person in the team to use Linux (the others are on Macs) but everybody switched. That for whom thinks that supporting Linux is not important.