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Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

bloomberg.com

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Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#251

Post by nikolay »

Many people replaced Skype with Viber as there's no spam. I have a very old Skype account with a vanity username, which results in tens of Russians adding me and wasting a few minutes a day blocking and reporting them for spam. Also, when abroad, Viber's audio codecs seem to use less bandwidth and provide better audio quality.

I actually like the new Skype very much, but the spam issue needs to be solved!

There are many fake accounts, no way to merge different Microsoft IDs, etc.

I have to agree that Microsoft by not having its full attention on Skype ruined a huge potential! It allowed many messengers to bloom when it was basically a monopoly.

Honestly, there's very little that needs to be done to make Skype better and I'm not sure why Microsoft cares less about it!

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#252

Post by rozhok »

1 GiB to store nice animated emojis from movies — check 1 GiB RAM usage when actively chatting — check poor voice quality — check constant, annoying and completely useless redesigns — check "rate the call" after the each call — check

well...I only use it because I have clients and people who sit only in Skype.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#253

Post by dmurray »

ams6110 wrote: post #161
tinus_hn wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Direct connections for audio or video calls are a patented ‘invention’ that is why the major vendors like Microsoft and also Apple changed to server based communication.

Good grief. Direct connect audio calls were invented over a century ago. It was called the "telephone" Switched calls were invented decades ago. How can a patent still be valid?

"X, but on a computer" was a popular way of getting new patents which generally worked in the US until the Alice Corp Supreme Court decision of 2014.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Inte...

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#254

Post by magduf »

burntwater wrote: post #245
braythwayt wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Wifi and continental breakfast. At cheaper hotels, both will often be free. In an interesting twist, while a free continental breakfast will often be significantly lower quality than a paid higher-end breakfast, I've found that the free wifi is almost always significantly better than the paid wifi. In fact, many business hotels have tiered wifi plans. And they all suck, even their most expensive plans will be worse t…

Ok, but I'm still wondering which hotels are these corporate-friendly anti-consumer hotels. I haven't seen any hotels with non-free Wifi, and I've stayed at quite a few different big ones.

As for continental breakfast, sure it's not as good as some really good sit-down breakfast restaurant, but it's free and more importantly it's fast: you just go down to the lobby and either eat it there or grab some stuff and take it back to your room to munch on before you leave for the day. It's a big time-saver. Going to a separate restaurant and waiting for food to be made for you and delivered and then waiting and waiting and waiting for the waiter to bring you the check takes a lot of time.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#255

Post by packet_nerd »

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…

> Skype for business is absolutely excellent though.

I beg to differ on this.. we use Skype for business and have heard nothing but complaints.

One personal beef I have with it is IM messages don't sync between devices. I start a chat with someone on my workstation then when I leave my desk and try to see it on my phone it's unavailable. Or same issue when switching between an RDP and local session.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#258

Post by slededit »

cm2187 wrote: post #14
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…

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.

I was there at the time (on an app team) The people behind the new UI really thought it was right and everyone else just hadn't got it yet.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#260

Post by mattbeckman »

SN76477 wrote: post #259

I use skype every day for calls with my team. The problem to me is that it has become bloated. Banner ads, search functions, emos, bots, ratings... ugh just give me simple clean messaging with calling

It's the first app in a very long time that I downgraded to a previous version. Previous version is available from their download page.
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