Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#311

Post by CWuestefeld » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:00 PM UTC

maxsilver wrote: post #191

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…

> Then they must justify those costs with features that sound like they produce big values. Typically these are not going to be things that make users' lives easier, they are going to be things that users may never see, like analytics and back-office integrations. Yes, and depending on the enterprise, these "big features only there to justify high costs" may not actually be needed or useful or relevant. It might be '…

This cuts both ways. We frequently get requirements in an RFP that we've got to put resources into supporting, but when everything gets put into place, the customer never uses the feature that they demanded. They wasted the cost of our investment into their demands.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#312

Post by sillysaurus3 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:02 PM UTC

ng-user wrote: post #301

komali2 wrote: post #262

I bet one hundred dollars that if I tried to login to my old Skype account right now, it would take an hour to figure out how the fuck to reset my password, because"Microsoft account" bullshit. I bet it would take me three hours to make a new account, for the same reason. Try making an account for Microsoft's iot cloud thing. Good luck. Edit: https://youtu.be/lfby-SOWWqQ So, holy shit, somehow it auto populated maybe…

So are you going to donate that $100 to charity?

Speaking of lost bets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6703467

I just lost a 5-year bet for $10 to Keyframe (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Keyframe)

It would be mildly interesting to have an HN-bets type service, with the proceeds going to charity.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#313

Post by fphhotchips » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:04 PM UTC

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #292

munk-a wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 designe…

Or in the case of Microsoft, the software has been around since the DOS days and is nothing but legacy kludges. Look at Office for an example. It's a 30-year-old code base and everything about it shows. Office is clearly designed to maximize the number of tick marks marketing can put in their materials, and very little else.

I would argue that Office is one of the least applicable examples here. Software with such a mind-bogglingly large install base would be very difficult to improve, but they keep doing it relatively well. Recent versions of Office are significantly better even than a couple years ago in terms of stability, performance and functionality. Find me a better desktop office suite.

I think a lot of the flack Office catches is because of how wide it casts its net. Just because you don't use a piece of functionality doesn't mean that it is bad.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#314

Post by LifeLiverTransp » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:04 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…

https://www.lifewire.com/skype-changes-from-p2p-3426522

Cooperate customers (and secret service) demanded it- but it turned out to be a quality of call death spiral.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#315

Post by jacquesm » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:06 PM UTC

tinus_hn wrote: post #291

jacquesm wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were a number of patent trolls that tried to milk this but if I could resist them then certainly so could the likes of Microsoft. This is definitely not the reason for the switch. See also: https://jacquesmattheij.com/my-brush-with-a-patent-troll

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirnetX#Patents Unlike these big companies you probably don’t stand to lose half a billion dollar. You’re just going to go bankrupt.

Note they settled for < $.1 / user and Skype kept happily rolling along.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#316

Post by cgh » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

magduf wrote: post #254

burntwater wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wifi and continental breakfast. At cheaper hotels, both will often be free. In an interesting twist, while a free continental breakfast will often be significantly lower quality than a paid higher-end breakfast, I've found that the free wifi is almost always significantly better than the paid wifi. In fact, many business hotels have tiered wifi plans. And they all suck, even their most expensive plans will be worse t…

Ok, but I'm still wondering which hotels are these corporate-friendly anti-consumer hotels. I haven't seen any hotels with non-free Wifi, and I've stayed at quite a few different big ones. As for continental breakfast, sure it's not as good as some really good sit-down breakfast restaurant, but it's free and more importantly it's fast: you just go down to the lobby and either eat it there or grab some stuff and take…

At the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, where I've stayed in the past, wifi wasn't free. I've heard that's changed but I haven't checked the website to confirm. Rooms are roughly 300USD/night.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#317

Post by skate22 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:12 PM UTC

I use skype pretty regularly outside of work. Its pretty convienient, especially if i need to share a screen quick. I never really have connection issues related to skype.

Most people have it, and its simple

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#318

Post by sebtoast » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

packet_nerd wrote: post #255

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…

> Skype for business is absolutely excellent though. I beg to differ on this.. we use Skype for business and have heard nothing but complaints. One personal beef I have with it is IM messages don't sync between devices. I start a chat with someone on my workstation then when I leave my desk and try to see it on my phone it's unavailable. Or same issue when switching between an RDP and local session.

If you enabled it (it is by default I believe), the conversations are stored in Outlook.

It sucks... but you can still get to them if you have access to Outlook.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#319

Post by howaboutnmc » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #312

ng-user wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So are you going to donate that $100 to charity?

Speaking of lost bets: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6703467 I just lost a 5-year bet for $10 to Keyframe ( https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=Keyframe ) It would be mildly interesting to have an HN-bets type service, with the proceeds going to charity.

This website is not very active, but it does what you want : http://longbets.org/

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#320

Post by fphhotchips » Thu, May 10, 2018, 9:20 PM UTC

Tehchops wrote: post #113

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" -…

Yea, based on our experience with SfB I'm frankly a little gobsmacked there are any enterprise clients with an overwhelmingly positive take on their experience. I mean, they tout GE, a company in the middle of an incredibly well documented and historically expensive failure of a transition to a "digital" company. Probably not the best example. You'll have millions of minutes spent in Skype to wave around when getting…

Don't even get me started on Webex. It's better than SfB sure, but only just. On Windows it will turn off cleartype whenever you do a screenshare, so whatever effort you were putting in to make something look good goes straight out of the window.