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Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

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Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#381
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…

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 shit. It filters content. I cannot paste an error to a colleague, because it's "too large". If I first write a meaningless "Hi" instead, I can paste the text just fine.

Settings revert a lot.

It's damn slow for remote sessions. Barely usable, really. File transfers don't work most of the time (and are slow).

Phone service? Call quality is really really bad.

The mobile app (Android at least) eats battery like candy, fails to send messages and is crashing a lot.

Lync/Skype for Business is a daily pain to suffer here.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#382
post #149

Why is everybody hating skype? It's great! - It's almost as fast as SMTP for messages (pulling every 30 minutes or so). - If someone calls you, it never rings on the device you're currently using, allowing you play with that other device you had totally forgotten about. - It does it's best to distract you from what you want to do (communicate), by teasing you with social features you hate. - It's user interface is aw…

This is a problem for people who trust MS updates. I use old (7.41) Skype on Windows 7, old (7.46) Skype on Android.

- It doesn't pull every 30 minutes, that's just wrong.

- It rings on all devices for me

- No teasing with social BS

- Button for screen sharing is one right-click away like it always was.

Take back your freedom from BS updates and you will be alright.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#383
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…

The new electron-based UI is super shitty too. Thank god I still can use the old native app on the Mac for now.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't have peer-to-peer and expect it to work on mobile phones.

Why not? The signaling layer DHT probably shouldn't be on the phone clients, but everything else should be fine.

Because data plans and batteries run out too quickly. And the quality of the networks is really bad compared to non-mobile networks

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? The signaling layer DHT probably shouldn't be on the phone clients, but everything else should be fine.

Because data plans and batteries run out too quickly. And the quality of the networks is really bad compared to non-mobile networks

Right, so like I said, don't run the signalling DHT on the phones, but run it on everything else.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because data plans and batteries run out too quickly. And the quality of the networks is really bad compared to non-mobile networks

Right, so like I said, don't run the signalling DHT on the phones, but run it on everything else.

For peer-to-peer to work you need to reroute data/traffic through nodes as well. You you can't really do that on mobile devices because once again: data, battery, network reliability.

If you don't do that and connect directly to a central node, you've done what Skype has done: become a client-server application with centralised servers.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#387

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 recently moved onto Discord from Skype to keep in contact with a couple of people I work with. It's ok, but has some really irritating quirks, from updating too frequently, with a fiddly-to-hide loading screen that likes to sit on top of all my other windows, to locking out the scrollbar on my browser intermittently (!) to the most egregious of all (for me): not allowing me to copy and paste text from Adobe Illustr…

Did you try Shift+Ctrl+V to paste the text without formatting?

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#388
post #149

Why is everybody hating skype? It's great! - It's almost as fast as SMTP for messages (pulling every 30 minutes or so). - If someone calls you, it never rings on the device you're currently using, allowing you play with that other device you had totally forgotten about. - It does it's best to distract you from what you want to do (communicate), by teasing you with social features you hate. - It's user interface is aw…

This is a problem for people who trust MS updates. I use old (7.41) Skype on Windows 7, old (7.46) Skype on Android. - It doesn't pull every 30 minutes, that's just wrong. - It rings on all devices for me - No teasing with social BS - Button for screen sharing is one right-click away like it always was. Take back your freedom from BS updates and you will be alright.

Also, Skype 7 at least still lets you export its damn history.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#389

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…

But think of all the cool things they're doing with this additional space! Like showing blue default profile pictures scaled up to half your screen so you can't see the document you actually want to edit together...

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on recent Linux updates (but not the most recent, it's become unusable for contacting family) I think they let each new intern remove a feature.

I don't consider removing superfluous features a bad thing as long as the core features are working flawlessly. EDIT: Apparently they removed really useful features which is a bad development.

The Windows 10 version removed microphone volume control. You would think that this is a core feature for Skype, but apparently not. To make matters even worse, Skype now not only automatically chooses the microphone volume but also changes the global Windows mic volume. Which means that I have to reconfigure the mic volume after every call I make with Skype, because otherwise the volume is all messed up in every other app. It really boggles my mind.
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