Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#231

Post by sangnoir » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

pidg wrote: post #190

eksemplar wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. We run it as the sole phone service for more than 10.000 employees and it’s the best we’ve ever had software wise. Further than that I can find, chat with or call my counterparts from our neighboring municipalities as though they were from our own. We also frequently use it for video meetings on our Microsoft surface (or whatever that 80” touch screen thing is called…

Absolutely! I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. Didn't realise there were companies trying to use consumer Skype for their corporate calls. We have SfB handling everything at work - including PSTN - and it works fabulously all the time.

> I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense.

You can blame Microsoft for the confusion since they renamed Lync to SfB in order to leech off the (non-enterprise) Skype brand. I wonder if they will rename SfB again should the "Skype" become more toxic.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#232

Post by kwindla » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:22 PM UTC

ropeadopepope wrote: post #131

jenscow wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

We'd really love for you to try our startup's WebRTC calls + screen-sharing + dial-in application. Free video calls and telephone dial-in. We work really hard on call quality, reliability, and UX, building on top of the (increasingly good) core WebRTC spec/implementation available in Chrome. (And other browsers are coming along, too.)

https://www.daily.co/

We hugely value feedback about quality and reliability, especially from folks who have issues with everything else they've tried.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#233

Post by makecheck » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:23 PM UTC

api wrote: post #142

There's some kind of law in operation that states that all chat and telephony apps must evolve toward increased suckitude. I've lost count of how many good chat/voice/video apps started decent but then over time accumulated bloat, experienced degraded service (often due to bloat or a shift away from p2p), and got encrusted with gimmicks and marketing junk to the point that they became unusable. I suspect it's because…

It’s the same curse that other utility apps suffer, if they aren’t open source: there isn’t anything attractive about maintaining them. Smart engineers that built the thing move on to better projects eventually. The only “new” things left involve revamped UIs and misguided monetization strategies.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#234

Post by munk-a » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:27 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #130

erikb wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Enterprise software is a catch-all term, I worked on enterprise software and none of our customers were bigger than 500 users, most were less than 100. Enterprise software comes in a huge variety of quality.

Enterprise software is a nebulous term, I understand you hear a vague description of large software when you read it. Personally, to me, Enterprise is an entirely negative adjective, implying a software that spends more effort trying to do things it needs to do to support itself than it does trying to solve problems.

Enterprise also carries the meaning (again for me) of terribly architected software, possibly designed by someone who read about microservices and took it to the extreme that they've got an AWS lambda for doing strpad.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#235

Post by kwindla » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

chx wrote: post #174

mistermann wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone know of: 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…

> 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? Screw the semi-affordable part, I would pay several hundreds for that.

Our startup makes hardware that I think almost meets your description. We try to be excellent quality, super-easy setup, and easy to use: https://hardware.daily.co/pluot-tv

But our target market is company conference rooms and home offices, so we might not feel quite "consumer-y" enough for you.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#236

Post by razakel » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

binarymax wrote: post #15

"Microsoft Corp. says the criticism is overblown and reflects, in part, people's grumpiness with software updates." Denial is the first stage of acceptance. Not sure how long the full cycle takes for a company as large as Microsoft, but Skype is dead.

>"Microsoft Corp. says the criticism is overblown and reflects, in part, people's grumpiness with software updates."

Maybe because your approach to software updates is as intrusive and user-unfriendly as possible?

I have to switch my PC off at the mains to stop it from waking up at 3am, rebooting and losing everything I have open, installing updates and then not going back into hibernation.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#237

Post by DoofusOfDeath » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:39 PM UTC

winrid wrote: post #205

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…

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.

Man, if ever there was an example that justified requiring professional accreditation for commercial programmers...

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#238

Post by cuckcuckspruce » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:40 PM UTC

israrkhan wrote: post #182

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…

This happened because they migrated skype from a peer to peer software to centralized servers. While this has enabled certain innovations, like web-based skype and better integeration with other devices, it negatively impacted overall quality of skype.

It also got the US Intelligence Community off they are back as it gives them a single point of interception.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#239

Post by avodonosov » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

Skype is ok, skype for business is difficult

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#240

Post by indemnity » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:41 PM UTC

jmuguy wrote: post #201

gambiting wrote: post #18

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" -…

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.

In our company, the SfB on Mac users have an issue where login variably takes between 5 and 30 minutes.

Conferences are hilariously late because of this.

Also, Mac screen sharing usually crashes after a few minutes.

Sometimes calls get dropped and reconnnect just fails immediately with some weird error code until you sign out and delete all user data and log in again (waiting minutes).

Chat history disabled.

How we miss GotoMeeting...

If Slack conferences were better we’d all delete SfB ASAP.

No way in hell we would use Teams.

There was an option of Slack vs Teams and we had a huge stampede into Slack, but still have to use SfB because that’s the only way we can make phone calls since our physical phones were removed, and Slack conferencing options are limited.