Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 436 posts

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#191

Post by maxsilver »

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…

> Then they must justify those costs with features that sound like they produce big values. Typically these are not going to be things that make users' lives easier, they are going to be things that users may never see, like analytics and back-office integrations.

Yes, and depending on the enterprise, these "big features only there to justify high costs" may not actually be needed or useful or relevant. It might be 'OK' to have a bunch of interns slap something together, if it only needs to be "real" enough to look pretty and look functional in a few demos or in a few specific happy-day cases.

Analytics and Reporting is probably the most common example I've seen of this -- it's not a bad feature on it's own, but companies will sometimes pay top dollar for it, even in places it makes no sense and/or will never get used. If that gets delivered in a broken/unusable state, it's "ok" because the customer will never actually click that button anyway.

----

If "New Skype" is "enterprise communication support" in a corporate feature list (and not a real product filling a real need, as it used to be) then I can see how a broken or unusable Skype could still be a 'success' for Microsoft.

Note: I don't agree with any or support any of this. But I've seen this play out in real life enough to know it happens.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#192

Post by bonestamp2 »

red_admiral wrote: post #183

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…

> which removes the list of all your contacts

Ya, they fucked this up. Favorites are no longer supported but you can "pin" your "favorite" people so they go to the top, unless you have an unread message from a non-pin then that goes above your pins. But after you read your unread message from your non-pin then that thread is moved below your pins, so... good luck finding that again after you've had a few of those threads! It was far better the way it was before when the favorites and other were separate.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#193

Post by cm2187 »

nikanj wrote: post #159
cm2187 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Firing the head of the Windows division came late in the game. From what I’ve heard, critizing the UX was a great way to ruin your annual performance reviews (and get fired).

It's going to be hard to find the exact episode but I remember an episode of dotnetrocks where Carl & Richard (who are reasonably close to Microsoft and aren't really anti-msft) mentioned that when Sinofsky walked up the stage to announced Windows 8 he had already been told he would be asked to go.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#194

Post by jacquesm »

occamrazor wrote: post #129
gowld wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is peer-to-Internet--peer worse connectivity than peer-to-DC-to-peer for UDP streaming? The peers aren't moving themselves to the DC to sit on their calls.

When both users are behind a firewall, in some cases the Skype connection was peer-to-supernode-to-peer, not straight peer-to-peer. Replacing a supernode, which could have been a user on a mediocre DSL connection, with a server in a datacenter with good connectivity _should_ improve call quality.

Yes, but if they had implemented that as a fall-back after a problem was detected I doubt anybody would have had a problem with it. Instead they routed all the traffic through their DC and for a very large number of calls that meant more hops and at least one extra latency incurring handler of the packet stream. So even if in some edge cases it was a win for a large number of calls it was a net loss.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#195

Post by OnMyPhone »

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'm also unable to see a list of my contacts filtered by who is online in the app, which I consider to be as basic as it gets."

It still boggles my mind that someone thought this is a good thing to do.

I read on a KB on MS site when I was trying to figure out how to change that, and it said to see if someone is online send them a message first. I'm paraphrasing of course, but I couldn't believe that that was coming from MS about something so simple as trying to figure out who is online.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#197

Post by rhizome »

Someone1234 wrote: post #99
gambiting wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" -…

Skype for Business is actually being deprecated and replaced with Microsoft Teams[0]. Microsoft Teams is impressive that it actually manages to have a worse desktop client than Skype for Business, and the web site is barely any better. If people on O365 haven't used it, they should since Microsoft will force it on you sooner or later. It is like Microsoft wanted to clone a bunch of popular services (e.g. Slack) and j…

It is like Microsoft wanted to clone a bunch of popular services (e.g. Slack) and just mashed them all together without a care in the world

The LinkedIn Model.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#198

Post by DenisM »

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…

>Having done absolutely nothing would have left Skype in a better shape

You don't get a promotion for doing nothing. Doing something, on the other hand, might just work.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#199

Post by [deleted] »

MR4D wrote: post #187
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 y…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#200

Post by xstartup »

This is very true. Skype had huge exploits and some blackhat folks went to Skype support and told them that the victim's account is treating them and Skype banned victims can't without any investigation.

Skype also banned victim who was infected with a malware where malware would just post links to other people to remove them randomly from groups.

Skype just bans you for no reason. I've lost one of my most valuable business accounts to scammers who used malware attack to destroy my account.

Post reply on HN