Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#221

Post by m-p-3 » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

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...

We switched to Gsuite. Hangouts Meet with an automatically provided dial-in phone number for those unable to join the meeting through data sercices works well.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#222

Post by alkonaut » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:01 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…

I havent had a sound or conection issue in Skype in many years (10?) despite using it for international calls several times per day, both 1-1 and group, both voice and video. It’s possible that it just isn’t tolerant to intermittent network problems and I just don’t have any. Not sure.

It’s horrible in most other ways (autocorrect, emoji, ads, installation, limited group size for screen sharing, ...) but calls are really the one thing that works 100%

Edit: I’m talking about Skype proper, not Lync, the product Microsoft later dubbed “Skype for business”.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#223

Post by T-N-T » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:01 PM UTC

codedokode wrote: post #77

Several years ago MS released a new, "RT" version of app for Windows. One of the differences is that it doesn't even have an option to disable updates. So if Microsoft decides to add more ads or integrate more Facebook pages or make the app even less usable, you cannot opt out of that. By the way, I hate updates. Today I updated Sublime Text and the background of code changed from light grey to white, making it harde…

> One of the differences is that it doesn't even have an option to disable updates

Even if you could disable updates it doesn't matter because Skype is a centralized client-server architecture under Microsoft and I've personally witnessed friends who wondered why they couldn't use skype anymore on their computer because they had an old version installed of the desktop client and it couldn't connect to the servers anymore. Past a certain amount of time, Microsoft invalidates old versions and render them unable to connect. Whether it's by changing the protocol or just banning their ability to pair, I don't know, it's an implementation detail, the intent remains the same : update, update, update.

From that point of view of how it works in the real world, the RT version is an improvement over the desktop client because it's able to always remain updated without having to ask for user consent. There are too many users who don't say yes to updates and then ask why the software is broken and won't work later and I bet it has been a pain for people who work in the support side of Skype. The average user does not understand why the software stops working.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#224

Post by magduf » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:03 PM UTC

braythwayt wrote: post #165

CountSessine wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't agree with this more! What really characterizes 'enterprise software' is that the people selecting and buying it are different people than the people who have to use it . 'enterprise software' is sold to stove-pipe organizations. It can be all sorts of awful for the people who actually have to use it, as long as the people making the purchasing decision come out of the deal looking good. The software vendo…

Exactly. There is a similar phenomenon with hotels. Some hotels cater to people who pay with their own money, others to people on expense accounts. The hotels that cater to people on expense accounts often have what appears to be terrible customer service, but that's only because the "guests" are not the customer, the accounts payable and event management groups are the customers. Those users get great features they…

Can you specify which hotels are the ones that cater to people on expense accounts please? I've never heard this, but it makes sense and I'd like to avoid those hotels.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#225

Post by kwindla » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:06 PM UTC

wetpaws wrote: post #106

jacquesm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skype was excellent at traversing all kinds of firewalls, in fact that made them the market leader.

This. You could spend days setting up port forwarding and tunneling for some game, but you could always be sure Skype will find some loophole and just work out of the box.

And UDP hole-punching has actually gotten much easier. It's baked into the collection of specs that make up WebRTC now, for example. https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5389

Mobile networks often don't allow UDP hole punching, and for users behind corporate firewalls, NAT is impossible. But the standards support for "try p2p, then fall back to lightweight relaying of media, then fall back to tunneling inside HTTPS" are really good, now.

So I don't really buy that Microsoft switched to centralized media relaying because of changes in deployed network architecture.

Possibly the goal is to eventually unify how Skype for Business and "consumer" Skype work. If you are selling a communications tool to enterprise customers, it does make sense to move away from p2p, because enterprise networks are generally locked down in ways that might make the decision to just skip even trying to support p2p defensible.

Or maybe it's the lure of building features you can only do on media servers (compositing, various kinds of content analysis including inserting Cortana hooks into every call, etc).

Or maybe the speculations about government pressure are correct.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#226

Post by oblio » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:08 PM UTC

wittekm wrote: post #121

Skype for Android is unbelievably bad. I uninstalled it after the following: - a spam bot texts me asking to connect - which, whatever. - my locked phone wakes up from sleep and /launches into Skype/ to show me this exciting information - it literally could be solved by a notification - it is not configurable in settings I can understand the "bypass lock screen" behavior for an incoming phone call, but this is such a…

The real way they should benchmark their app is do similar actions on 2 identical phones in Skype and Whatsapp. Skype is slow opening up and sluggish afterwards. It gets stuck sometimes... Whatsapp is fast and flawless, in comparison.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#227

Post by makecheck » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:11 PM UTC

goofballlogic wrote: post #218

There's still an opportunity for Microsoft to fix this. They definitely have major problems with basic functional requirements at the moment (like reliably displaying messages that another person has sent to you in chat), but there's not really another offering out there with the brand associations that the Skype name comes with. All they need to do to bring people back is simplify and focus on robustness of the key…

They can’t repair an app that people just delete and refuse to download “updates” for (as I did after about the 4th downgrade-billed-as-update graced my phone).

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#228

Post by kwindla » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:11 PM UTC

akvadrako wrote: post #79

kuschku wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They switched from P2P to a hosted model because suddenly CGNATs showed up everywhere on the internet with no way through them.

Is that really true? My understanding is most CGNs are full-cone, and keep the same external IP+port for the same source IP+port combo for the duration of the mapping. Thus, you can use a STUN server to establish a direct connection. Certainly my ISP works in this manner, but I can't find much data about industry trends.

This is our experience running a WebRTC-based service that tries hard to do peer-to-peer when possible. It's usually possible, except for people behind enterprise (big company) firewalls.

But there is a big exception -- mobile networks. Mobile data networks don't allow udp hold punching. You have to relay the media.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#229

Post by braythwayt » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:12 PM UTC

magduf wrote: post #224

braythwayt wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. There is a similar phenomenon with hotels. Some hotels cater to people who pay with their own money, others to people on expense accounts. The hotels that cater to people on expense accounts often have what appears to be terrible customer service, but that's only because the "guests" are not the customer, the accounts payable and event management groups are the customers. Those users get great features they…

Can you specify which hotels are the ones that cater to people on expense accounts please? I've never heard this, but it makes sense and I'd like to avoid those hotels.

It used to be that you could apply "The Coffee Test:" When I started my career, the hotels that gave you free coffee (either in the room, or in the lobby) catered to people paying their own way. The hotels that made you call room service and order a $6 cup of instant, plus tip... They catered to corporations.

Nowadays almost everyone has some kind of instant coffee machine in the room. It could be that free WiFi is the new marker for quickly delineating one from the other.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#230

Post by raverbashing » Thu, May 10, 2018, 6:15 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #104

noonespecial wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>putting 100 first semester students into a room full of drugs and costumes and then letting them act "professional". That had to be the most succinct description of the corporate work environment I've ever encountered. I'm shamelessly stealing that. Well said.

no problem, CC-BY-SA.

Sounds good enough. Bonus points, it will prevent anyone with a significant legal team from using it.