Am I the only one who thought pre-Microsoft skype was a poorly-functioning product?
Being more specific might help.
Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
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Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#12Um.. 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 do not understand why a software company who has long made money in the enterprise with Office, SQL Server, etc cannot make an integrated chat program that works well in a corporate environment. This Lync Skype beast is so buggy and it doesn't even have code paste one tenth as decent as what Sametime had a decade ago, and MS makes TOOLS FOR DEVELOPERS! Do they not use Lync/Skype in-house? Dog-folding should make it better right away, unless MS employees just don't collaborate with each other?
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#13Conference call used to be a lucrative business, then Skype came and killed revenues with their free offerings. So what do you do ?
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#14"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…
Agree. It reminds me of Microsoft's defense of Windows 8, "people are just struggling to adjust to something that's new". Whereas internally they were aware that their UX sucked, the OEM all told them the UX sucked, and they fired the head of the Windows division.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#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.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#16What I find most interesting about Skype is that it rose from the ashes of Kazaa, and as far as I can remember was originally using a similar/same backend and peer to peer protocols to facilitate the calls. When MS got I think they removed the peer-to-peer elements (which made skype great) and made it a centralised service. At least that is my recollection of events.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#17For business, just use Zoom. A few months ago I fired it up after years of neglect and— wow— the client connected to the meeting no update required.
Now that’s software built for the future.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#18Um.. 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" - we had an actual Level 3 tech support from MS remote over to his machine to find out the issue, it was some broken registry settings.
Selecting and copying text is a lottery - sometimes it will copy exactly what you highlighted, sometimes it won't - which is bizzare for an IM program. And then there's the conferencing, oh my god the conferencing. If you are in a conference room and someone left another account logged in with skype open, then no other user on that pc can make/receive calls - the only way to fix it is to restart the machine. I honestly can't believe we're paying money for this thing.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#19[deleted]
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#20I bought an Xbox One with Kinect just to use Skype with my family. The good quality camera and mic, and the ability to have everyone gather around on the sofa and see each other on the TV made it seem worth it.
After the "upgrade" to the unified Windows app a few months back, we've given up and are now using Hangouts on our phones. That's how bad it is. Counterintuitive design, hard to use with media remote, unreliable call establishment. Such a waste.
I guess it's my own fault tho, because the only reason I bought the Xbox One was to replace the Logitech TV Cam HD that Skype also broke post-Microsoft acquisition.