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Microsoft is killing Skype

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Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#171

Post by tetris11 »

fh973 wrote: post #149
kaon_ wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. In German the word for "video-calling" is "Skyping". Similar to MSN, the strength of the brand and goodwill that it has in some geographies is on-par with Google for search, or Coca Cola for coke. The fact that the software got consistently worse, year on year on year is hard to grasp for me. Microsoft made the right call to cannibalize and use teams. But how was Skype such a pain? Not being able to share scree…

In Germany, MS was very successful though to get organizations on Teams during the pandemic. Zoom is not a thing. Sure, it's nice to brand the verb, but when the product behind it is EOL, why bother.

Jitsi and BBB were pretty popular across universities at the time, back when the German government were pivoting hard into Element/Matrix:

https://element.io/matrix-in-germany

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#173

Post by machomaster »

grishka wrote: post #81
wsc981 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not even sure if Microsoft was interested in the technology. I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network. I believe Microsoft replaced this way of working shortly after acquiring Skype. Perhaps on behalf of security agencies.

> I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network. It did! It was some impressively cool tech too. At the time, at least in my country, some ISPs would disable your internet access when you didn't pay, but the LAN between subscribers still worked. So obviously nothing worked, except Skype . My theory then was that it would find a path to route around the disconnection by having the Skype client o…

This approach to technology has serious problems. I would send a message to someone and turned off my computer, thinking that the message would be sent whenever the recipient was online. However, that was not the case. The message only arrived when we were online at the same time. Therefore, Skype is completely useless as a tool for asynchronous communication, for the main type of messaging!

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#174

Post by cynicalsecurity »

drooopy wrote: post #101

The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic to maintain or even expand their lead in video conferencing, while allowing a complete unknown (outside of the corporate world, at least) like Zoom to become the dominant platform, should be studied in business schools. The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling that, based on personal experience, it is still used in place of FaceTime…

Big corporations are usually super slow and clumsy in implementing anything new or doing any quick changes.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#176

Post by Macha »

Oh, that will be hard for my grandparents and some overseas family members. Someone managed to teach them Skype at great effort some years ago and it's still the main they use for video calling to see their grandkids. Probably will need to try teach them Google Meet or something instead, but they're not the most receptive to new tech.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#177

Post by bayindirh »

l33tman wrote: post #124
OvbiousError wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost everything I do for work uses teams, so I can't say MS missed any boats. It's spectacular how pervasive teams is given how universally reviled it is. I'd personally switch back to slack in a heartbeat for instance.

Don't know about Slack's videoconf, but Slack's cheap insistence that we pay a rip-off amount of money per month for storing some TEXT messages more than 90 days has continuously degraded my appreciation for it over the last years to the level of me hating it now. They're so cheap. Just put a quota on total storage or something, that actually map to their costs.. We have a Slack for a shared office of 10 people or so…

Slack is part of Salesforce now. Do I need to say anything else?

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#179

Post by skeletal88 »

caseyy wrote: post #52
klohto wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actively harmed by US tech giants Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.

I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated. There was a vibe of “things are going to change around here, no more free rides, the grown-ups have arrived.” Awful management decisions were made, most of the talent left, and the team from the original company now only exists on paper. n=1 an…

Anecdote about MS and Skype.

Knew a developer who worked there.

Day 1 of aquisition - there were 4 layers of managers between him and Steve Ballmer.

A year later there were 8. Tjis is how much bureaucracy and managers MS added in only one year

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#180

Post by grishka »

machomaster wrote: post #173
grishka wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network. It did! It was some impressively cool tech too. At the time, at least in my country, some ISPs would disable your internet access when you didn't pay, but the LAN between subscribers still worked. So obviously nothing worked, except Skype . My theory then was that it would find a path to route around the disconnection by having the Skype client o…

This approach to technology has serious problems. I would send a message to someone and turned off my computer, thinking that the message would be sent whenever the recipient was online. However, that was not the case. The message only arrived when we were online at the same time. Therefore, Skype is completely useless as a tool for asynchronous communication, for the main type of messaging!

Maybe, but somehow it didn't matter very much back then. I remember using private chats mostly as an addition to calls, i.e. when I wanted to send someone a link or a file I was talking about. If I wanted to just send a message to someone regardless of whether they were online, Skype wasn't really an option I considered, it was ICQ, later VKontakte, and now Telegram.

Group chats in Skype though, those were popular. Nothing else had good group chats at the time, but then again, after VK introduced them, everyone I know quickly moved there. I don't know how message delivery worked there, but you could receive messages that were sent while you were offline just fine. Maybe you got them from any one online participant, or maybe the "supernodes" did some sort of store-and-forward thing, or maybe a bit of both.

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