Seems hard to believe that no one would have bought this brand at least.
Perhaps instead of that they're shutting it down for creative accounting purposes?
RIP Skype
21–30 of 87 posts
Re: RIP Skype
#22Early one morning in August 2007 I was asleep in my apartment in Leiden and I got a call from my boss Dirk-Willem van Gulik to tell me that 1) Skype was having a global outage, 2) we had to help anyway we could, 3) scope, budget, people, nothing would get in our way. At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas. We built 3 networks, in 3 countries, in a matter of…
> you can make a business with a great product
Depends on the market reach. A product struggling due to scale (a good problem to have: Like WhatsApp c. early 2010s during New Years) and a product that mostly does not do what it should (the very many dead WhatsApp clones) are very different things.
> a lesson in there about recoverable and resilient
I remember the time Skype was pre-installed on popular Androids (including the Kindle Fire) and yet couldn't compete with the likes of Viber, Kik, LINE, WeChat (which also came pre-installed). Think MSFT was that soft landing that broke that resilience.
> So you can have multi-day world-headline outages ... unicorn scale
I mean, us-east-1 is a prime example ;)
Re: RIP Skype
#23I haven't given Skype a thought in years. I wish I could say the same for Teams, that thing that administrators seem to love and users seem to hate.
I guess the reason you see MS Teams everywhere is because it is bundled for free with all those MS365 packages that are bought for Excel anyway. And for free it certainly is good enough. Group policies and integration into the MS365 admin backend is just icing on the cake.
Good enough is the problem. We've got Windows, Mac, Android, IOS and Linux clients and the only platform it seems to work on over 95% of the time is Windows; but unfortunately it's free and 95% of the users are on Windows so it's what we use.
I think the EU were right with their antitrust case.
Re: RIP Skype
#24I liked the Skype Out function allowing you to call any phone from the Skype app using whatever WiFi or data you could find while traveling.
If anyone’s looking for the same functionality without anything complicated I did some research and ended up with the Viber app. It’s a social network which you don’t have to use at all, and provides the same function as Skype Out to call regular phones.
Re: RIP Skype
#25"Teams (free)" seems like poor branding for a person-to-person personal communications product. I suspect that most such users moved to Whatsapp long ago, although I'm not sure of the situation in North America.
Re: RIP Skype
#26Let's hope Teams is next in line
Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience? More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?
I use teams, I don't get the hate but have also not use slack. Are there good videos about it?
Re: RIP Skype
#27Let's hope Teams is next in line
Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience? More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?
I’ve never met anyone who chose to use Teams. My organization forces me to use it. I don’t like it, but to its credit, it is better than “Skype for business.”
It’s strange to me how companies take these huge messaging brands and then just burn them down (Skype, MSN Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google’s chatbominations, even AIM). As a user, they don’t fizzle out due to user disinterest, it’s always the owner just sort of doing away with it for something new.
Is there just not a financial model here? Cheap to run and lots of users but no money. Skype seemed to be profitable back when I would use it for international calling.
Re: RIP Skype
#28Let's hope Teams is next in line
Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience? More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?
My guess is that for the VCs and PMs at Teams, it is easier to play politics and ensure your product is tightly integrated and coupled with other MS products, than to build an actual quality product.
It speaks of the culture at MS really, but it's amazing how a revenue and cash rich company can keep a dogshit product going.
I despise teams, all my colleagues despise teams, all my friends despise teams. It's a product that all users hate with amazing uniformity. But MS bundles it with Office, which makes demure and uninspired IT departments use it because it's less work.
Re: RIP Skype
#29Skype could’ve become WhatsApp, Zoom, or Discord. In 2010 it was in the prime position to win any of those segments.
It was the "whatsapp" around 2010: everyone had an account on it, was using it's name as a word, ... and it was working really well at a time when it wasn't so common to use video chat, smartphones, ... The story only repeats again though, like MSN messenger almost a decode before. Which one will be next?
ICQ not MSN Messenger I thought
Re: RIP Skype
#30Let's hope Teams is next in line
Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience? More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?
Teams is a winning product.
It is not the best, but it offers just enough and is good enough that you dont want to spend on a separate dedicated product.
Especially as teams comes as a part of a bundle and is integrated with it.
I hate skype's interface (the is just so bad, even sharing screen), I also hate the sharepoint integration, but reality is that if you look at costs you will use it
Different thing is that windows 11 taskbar now has space for 11 windows open.. wow this is bad for any officr work