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Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

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Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#391
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Teams does something much better than SfB. It keeps IMs in sync between clients and devices. If I reply to an IM on my phone in SfB it stays on my phone. There's no way to get that conversation history onto my desktop client. Teams acts like you would expect and all clients get all the history.

Yes SfB's biggest problem is that it has skype in the name so people try to use it as an instant messenger.

It's ok for audio/video, but an abomination for instant messages - almost spitefully bad for text based communication due to the way it randomly redirects messages within a conversation to e.g. Outlook.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#392
post #281
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case of my company (a 40k employees multinational), everybody gets to suffer from Skype for Business' ridiculousness, I'm guessing even the people who bought it (heck, I'm guessing even the CEO is cursing it on a regular basis). Still, we use it.

Skype for business is not even 'skype'. Actually, it's "lync" branded as skype. Overall it's an awful product with hilarious built-in html render that ends in CPU saturation during group chat and a bit of html content. It takes like a minute to close itself if there are 20-30 chats.

Right. As a Linux user I skipped most of Skype for Business experience. It cannot even do passive screen sharing (i. e. display what others share). A web client that cannot show all contents... And that for a paid service, every free aka customer is the product service works in Linux browsers.

The old normal (not for business) Skype Linux client could even do active screen sharing (share your own screen) on Linux. Although it was limited to 1:1 calls IIRC. Haven't checked whether they have managed to break/remove that in the new Linux client...

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#393
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're not using Windows, in which case it functionally doesn't exist. Seriously. I have never successfully connected a single call with it. (Understood that the same criticism can be levelled at Facetime etc -- which I also don't use.)

I use Linux as my native OS at my current shop and thought "Well they use Skype for Business and there's a new Skype for Linux client" .. but nope. Just as stated in this thread, it's a totally different protocol that's part of their Lync product. I ended up getting a license for Sky, a 3rd party commercial Skype for Business client for Linux. It's pretty decent for what it is, but I could have just installed a Windo…

Used to be the case that if a mac or Linux user connected, the call quality degraded for everyone on the call. Don't know if improved...

http://blog.schertz.name/2016/06/skype-for-business-vbss-upd...

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm saying make the nodes heterogeneous, and classify them into "actively participates in the primary functions of the distributed network", and "simply receives pushes that are related to me".

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#395
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…

I've tried Skype for Business and found it lacking. Skype for Business (now years into availability) doesn't handle screen control across the only two OSes it purports to "support" (MacOS and Windows). I think interactive drawing is also not supported everywhere.

From what I'm told, the Skype for Business back-end is not enterprise-ready, by which I mean the back-end is written to assume that one user or one set of users has admin control over all the lines set up in the system. So one user or set of users remains in charge of all of the telephony details (role-based accounts, response groups, etc.). A proper enterprise-ready program allows the admin capabilities to be limited to groups of users and delegate functionality to those groups for certain lines. This arrangement lets you have multiple simultaneous admins edit different non-conflicting details (such as setup for two different response groups) simultaneously with no problems. This means large organizations with lots of somewhat independent groups have to set up work queues where someone in each group files a request for the Skype for Business admin(s) to work on requests (e.g. Please make 123-555-1234 a response group set up in the following way...). This slows down an admin in any of those groups considerably as those admins wait for their work requests to be fulfilled or further questions to be sent back in response.

Also some of the limits in Skype for Business strike me as silly: one of them concerns response groups (a Skype for Business term for how inbound calls are routed to a series of receptionists called "agents" in Skype for Business parlance). If you want a response group where some of the agents are allowed to decide whether they want to receive the calls (known as a "formal login" response group in Skype for Business parlance), and other users are required to receive the calls (an "informal login") you can't have both of these kinds of agents in the same response group. You have to set it up so that, say, the informal login agents get the call first and (if they don't take the call after a few seconds) the call is passed to the formal login agents.

From what I'm told, Skype for Business doesn't handle nested directory service groups properly when those groups contain sets of agents (which I understand Skype for Business treats as distribution lists when one uses Microsoft's directory server Active Directory). If that's so, this means that organizations that keep tidy directory service hierarchies can't reuse their groups efficiently.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#396
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" -…

Had all these issues plus my UI switching to Korean.

Then I discovered a version which you can only download on windows 7 but force it onto windows 10 via compatability mode.entirely different to classic Skype and the windows 10 version.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Doesn't work ~50% of the time though.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#398
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…

Exactly this. Microsoft took something that worked almost all the time and turned it into a technical nightmare. I've spent hours trying to fix it for myself, both normal Skype and Skype for Business, and for my sister who has been trying to use it to reduce the amount she needs to travel to London for board meetings because they have much better things to do with their non-profit's budget than travel expenses and it's 2018.

Turns out in 2018 it's still easier to get on a train and meet up in a stuffy room somewhere than to use Skype or Hangouts to have a meeting.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm saying make the nodes heterogeneous, and classify them into "actively participates in the primary functions of the distributed network", and "simply receives pushes that are related to me".

What you're saying is: make all mobile nodes clients to centralised servers ;)

As a result, it's much easier to maintain a single architecture than two different architectures with rapidly diminishing number of desktop nodes taking all the traffic.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

$0.10 per non paying user is a lot of money and you don’t know what the rest of the terms were. Apple on the other hand chose the strategy you are advocating and they already lost over $400000000 and probably a ton of legal costs.
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