Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#401

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 11, 2018, 8:51 AM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #387

detritus wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#402

Post by singularity2001 » Fri, May 11, 2018, 8:52 AM UTC

kwindla wrote: post #216

singularity2001 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They removed the superfluous "detect/connect microphone" feature. Update: Wow so many upvotes, someone should create a webrtc startup.

:-) ... We're a WebRTC startup - https://daily.co - completely free WebRTC calls in Chrome, up to 50 participants in a call, free dial-in numbers in 25+ countries. Meeting recording coming later this month. Edge and Safari support soon.

"Sign in with Google" sorry you lost me right there.

Also tried 'Just click' but no demo opened.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#403

Post by braythwayt » Fri, May 11, 2018, 9:37 AM UTC

dzonga wrote: post #353

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…

I have been trying to find that Spolsky article, please link it up if you can

"Ask Joel," February, 2004, fourth item:

https://discuss.fogcreek.com/askjoel/default.asp?cmd=show&ix...

"With software sold in corporations, as soon as your price gets up in the $3000 level, the amount of approval it needs is so absurd that you are not going to sell products without a salesperson making a few visits. Hiring the salesperson, sending them out to make presentations, hotels, airfare -- now it costs $50,000 to get the sale done just in sales closing costs. That's why you see a lot of software products at $100,000 and a lot under $3000, but anywhere in-between and it's impossible to make sales. (It's sort of funny -- these big corporations create so much bureaucracy around purchasing in order to protect themselves against losing money, but they just force the vendors to spend a fortune on salesforces, which results in vastly higher prices for the big corporations)."

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#404

Post by romanovcode » Fri, May 11, 2018, 9:57 AM UTC

Since MS bought Skype it is gone to shit. What is even worse is that even with the "Windows Integrated Skype" which suppose to work seamlessly I get notifications about messages days later. This is just pathetic.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#405

Post by detritus » Fri, May 11, 2018, 10:36 AM UTC

laurent123456 wrote: post #387

detritus wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Thank you, Laurent123456 - that worked a treat!

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#406

Post by MatthiasP » Fri, May 11, 2018, 12:25 PM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #154

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…

I couldn't agree with this more! What really characterizes 'enterprise software' is that the people selecting and buying it are different people than the people who have to use it . 'enterprise software' is sold to stove-pipe organizations. It can be all sorts of awful for the people who actually have to use it, as long as the people making the purchasing decision come out of the deal looking good. The software vendo…

Also one of the reasons business laptops could get away with awful displays for such a long time.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#407

Post by magduf » Fri, May 11, 2018, 12:37 PM UTC

_acme wrote: post #309

magduf wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Any hotel nicer than your average Sheraton (Weston, W Hotels, etc.) will not have free Wi-Fi. Sheratons might not even have free Wi-Fi. Where you have been staying seem like they'd be classified as "motels" (like a Best Western Express or whatever) not actual "hotels".

Prove it.

I've been staying at places like Holiday Inn, Homewood Suites by Hilton, Country Inn & Suites, Courtyard, etc., which area all most certainly "hotels" and all of them have free Wifi.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#408

Post by magduf » Fri, May 11, 2018, 12:40 PM UTC

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #289

badpun wrote: 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.

And this is proof that Microsoft is still a monopoly, because they can still force people to use software they don't want. Microsoft's biggest accomplishment in technology in the last 20 years is to teach everyone that software is horrible and there's nothing that can be done about it.

They're not a monopoly, and they're not forcing anyone to use software they don't want. There's a bunch of different options if you don't like Skype. I've used GoToMeeting in the recent past, and it worked fine. The problem is that people are just too stupid to look for alternatives to Microsoft products, and would rather complain than do something about it.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#409

Post by kup0 » Fri, May 11, 2018, 12:48 PM UTC

typon wrote: post #95

fhood wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can not agree with you more. Skype for business has is an unmitigated disaster of a piece of software and whatever team is in charge of it needs to be fired or relocated so that Microsoft can start over on it. Skype for business is so insultingly bad that it is pretty much the only piece of widely used software that I am willing to claim that given a month I could write something far better.

Somehow it is WORSE than Microsoft Office communicator we used to use at my company.

Agreed. I've worked at two places now that have undergone the switch and it was worse in both cases. Not only the software being worse than its 2007 predecessor, but the upgrade itself broke all sorts of internal tools and functionality, thanks to unnecessary changes to the registry and SFB's desire to put add-ins in everything (IE, Outlook, Firefox, etc).

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#410

Post by distances » Fri, May 11, 2018, 1:52 PM UTC

eksemplar wrote: post #175

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…

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. 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.

The company I was working for had Skype for Business, and the video calls were such a disaster that people would secretly use Hangouts for every meeting that didn't have higher-ups participating.