What are some good Skype alternatives?
Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
171–180 of 436 posts
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#172Example: Used to be that if I needed to find something in a chat from days or months ago, I typed Ctrl-F and entered the search term and then navigate among the hits. It was instantaneous and I used it all the time.
Then everything changed. Ctrl-F did nothing. I couldn't find a search box. I googled how to search and wound up downloading a 3rd-party app (?). Later, I discovered that I had to go to a different place in the app and then select where I wanted to search (users, chat sessions, the Web, ...).
Bloaty, ignorant,... pissed off!
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#173Not only did they impressively annihilate the client and ruin the server protocol, they managed to invent new ways to fail.
For instance (probably caused by protocol changes) my parents’ television has a Skype app that doesn’t work anymore. And the TV helpfully displays an error message every single time the TV turns on, that can’t be fixed (we checked) because the built-in app is just broken now.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#174I 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, unreliab…
Does anyone know of: a) Any semi-affordable, braindead easy to use, consumer product or something a person can rig up for good quality family-sitting-on-the-couch video conferencing, with good quality and reliable audio and video? b) A multi-platform Skype alternative that can call land lines? This is what Skype should be. Google and Amazon both have popular home consumer devices, I would imagine Microsoft would love…
> Any semi-affordable, braindead easy to use, consumer product or something a person can rig up for good quality family-sitting-on-the-couch video conferencing, with good quality and reliable audio and video?
Screw the semi-affordable part, I would pay several hundreds for that.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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) and it works like a charm.
Private or normal Skype is one of the worst apps I’ve tried in 2018 though.
I wonder if it’s because they tore out the peer-to-peer stuff that made Skype great in the oldendays and replaced it with azure.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#176The article mostly focuses on business users. It cites a single consumer use case and in it person switched their mother from Skype to Facetime. To me, that seems like the most likely explanation of Skype's position in the consumer market: there are competing alternatives that didn't exist ten years ago when Skype was a private company. My suspicion is that Microsoft purchased Skype in 2011 as a response to Apple's introduction of Facetime in 2010 (at least in part). Skype allows Microsoft to be in the consumer space and across platforms. It's worth noting that at the time of Microsoft's Skype acquisition, it was not yet apparent that Apple would never make good on its statements suggesting Facetime would be an open protocol. Because the issues are structural, it's hard to see an obvious case where "Skype would have been better if not for Microsoft." Particularly since it was owned by private equity when Microsoft bought it.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#177Consumer 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…
Yeah the mobile client was the final nail in the coffin that made me switch to Discord. I would constantly be refreshing conversations and messages wouldn't show up.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#178Um.. 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" -…
You know how to take Skype FOR BUSINESS and make it even less useful? Prevent chat history, corporate-wide. You know, so we can't be forced to divulge the transcripts by a court. (As a Fortune-250, what do they have to hide?) Are there a lot of companies that share this practice? Did IBM release a white paper called "Chat History Deemed Harmful," and all Fortune 500 CIO's stroked their chins, nodded their heads, and contracted them to come turn it off? Or are we special?
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#179Saw someone post this on twitter:
Escape room idea:
You are in a conference room with - a projector - a speakerphone - guest wifi - camera - A surface laptop with slide deck - and a Skype meeting …
You can leave when everyone can see the slide deck and hear the presenter.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#180What are some good Skype alternatives?
Hangouts is a decent alternative.