Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#181

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:52 PM UTC

michrassena wrote: post #30

mnkypete wrote: 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...

Skype for Business client and server both seem to work pretty well. What I find annoying is Microsoft conflating the branding between two very different products, a rebadged enterprise communications product (formerly Lync) and a commercial-consumer product. So when someone says they want to make a Skype call with a client, what do they mean? Sometimes it's Skype for Business and sometimes it's plain old Skype. It co…

Which does seem to be why Skype for Business is getting replaced with Teams, and why Teams is not Skype branded at all, it's just branded Microsoft Teams.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#182

Post by israrkhan » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:53 PM UTC

std_throwaway wrote: post #37

Jun8 wrote: 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…

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…

This happened because they migrated skype from a peer to peer software to centralized servers. While this has enabled certain innovations, like web-based skype and better integeration with other devices, it negatively impacted overall quality of skype.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#183

Post by red_admiral » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:55 PM UTC

The first time Skype really annoyed me was when it decided that all video must be in 16:9 format, with no opt-out, resulting in the picture basically being cropped at the top and bottom in my case.

The second time was when it auto-updated to the "modern" version which removes the list of all your contacts, showing which ones are online.

For the time being, go.skype.com/classic.skype lets you get the "proper" version back. For 1-on-1 online video chats when skype is playing up I can also recommend appear.in, you don't even need to download anything, but it doesn't have a full contacts feature either.

There was a time when everyone in the publishing industry used PageMaker, until they suddenly switched to Adobe (if Joel is to be believed). I wouldn't mind if the same happened to skype, but I don't know what the alternative is yet.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#184

Post by MR4D » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

When RIOT gets to a more usable state (see the other post recently on the remaining issues), Skype is going to die.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#185

Post by sah2ed » Thu, May 10, 2018, 4:56 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #118

hedora wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find the CADT development model is surprisingly good at explaining most software engineering trainwrecks these days: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html

For the uninitiated: linking from HN to JWZ's blog has a slightly different effect than what you expect.

The effect works by showing a NSFW image if the referer is detected to be HN.

To avoid the effect, you need to open links to jwz.org in a private window.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#186

Post by EugeneOZ » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:00 PM UTC

Blaming users is a most favorite excuse of stupid developers.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#187

Post by MR4D » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:03 PM UTC

Jun8 wrote: 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…

What is so funny about this, is that they already have a solution for the corporate market - it's called Teams !!!

The ability for MSFT to reinvent the wheel is astounding. We use Teams at work, and had installed Skype for about 2 weeks before it got so annoying that we deleted Skype.

Now, we're looking to replace Teams with RIOT, once the software gets a little better. By my guess, that will probably be early next year.

The impetus to change is driven by the mindless complexity that MSFT products add to the office 365 stack. Every time we add an app, a new group gets created. Now we have so many groups, I am afraid of deleting them, as documents might be attached.

I still don't know what all Skype did for the brief two weeks we had it, but it's gone now!

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#188

Post by JohnJamesRambo » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:07 PM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #163

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…

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…

>their needs are subordinate to the needs of the individuals and departments who are actually paying for it.

Are you implying people are paying for dropped calls and poor performance as a feature?

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#189

Post by jamie_ca » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:11 PM UTC

ItsMe000001 wrote: post #152

jordache wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that's the nail in the coffin then why is skype still popular? The voice/video/screen share performance is consistently always bad, to the level of unusable.

Same reason people are on LinkedIn, FB, etc. I don't switch because all the people in my call list are on Skype. Also, I don't have any smartphone, only PC and laptop, so I don't even know or care what kind of apps for iOS or Android there are. ON teh PC I have to use "Skype Classic", which MS would like to get rid of (default download is the app for Windows 10). That app is unusable , and I'm tempted to add "literal…

I was gently ribbing my friends about their woes and complaints with Skype over the past few years (one in particular had repeated bouts of skype throwing up ads _with audio_) and commenting that my Mac client was just as usable as it's always been.

Alas that that's no longer the case, we've moved all our casual chat (and voice, and video, and screenshare) to Discord and haven't looked back.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#190

Post by pidg » Thu, May 10, 2018, 5:11 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…

Absolutely! I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. Didn't realise there were companies trying to use consumer Skype for their corporate calls.

We have SfB handling everything at work - including PSTN - and it works fabulously all the time.