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For business, just use Zoom. A few months ago I fired it up after years of neglect and— wow— the client connected to the meeting no update required. Now that’s software built for the future.
Sorry, but as someone who does a fair bit of screen share work, I dread receiving Zoom invites.
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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.
What I find most interesting about Skype is that it rose from the ashes of Kazaa, and as far as I can remember was originally using a similar/same backend and peer to peer protocols to facilitate the calls. When MS got I think they removed the peer-to-peer elements (which made skype great) and made it a centralised service. At least that is my recollection of events.
Yep, it used kazaa "supernodes" as servers for call setup and finding other nodes. Read an article about this a long time ago where someone reverse engineered it. There was also a lot of details about how Skype contained a shitload of anti reverse engineering techniques.
WhatsApp is such a dramatically better product in exactly the same way Skype never was. The UI is straightforward, it never crashes, finding people is a breeze, and I can call, chat, and share rich media so seamlessly I basically forget I'm doing it.
The world has moved on. Skype was a good product for its time, but I'm not sorry to see it go.
I bet one hundred dollars that if I tried to login to my old Skype account right now, it would take an hour to figure out how the fuck to reset my password, because"Microsoft account" bullshit. I bet it would take me three hours to make a new account, for the same reason. Try making an account for Microsoft's iot cloud thing. Good luck. Edit: https://youtu.be/lfby-SOWWqQ So, holy shit, somehow it auto populated maybe…
So are you going to donate that $100 to charity?
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Or in the case of Microsoft, the software has been around since the DOS days and is nothing but legacy kludges. Look at Office for an example. It's a 30-year-old code base and everything about it shows. Office is clearly designed to maximize the number of tick marks marketing can put in their materials, and very little else.
I would argue that Office is one of the least applicable examples here. Software with such a mind-bogglingly large install base would be very difficult to improve, but they keep doing it relatively well. Recent versions of Office are significantly better even than a couple years ago in terms of stability, performance and functionality. Find me a better desktop office suite. I think a lot of the flack Office catches i…
I used to think Excel was the one exception to Office being awful until I was assigned a project creating an app in Excel using VBA and found out how incredibly fragile Excel is. This was about 6 years ago.
However, I don't think anyone thinks Office is bad because it has stuff they don't use, but that the stuff they do use either doesn't work well (e.g., Outlook) or it's too hard to use (e.g., Word).
For those of us that can recall, skype wasn't that great even before the ebay purchase. It seems like no one (incl google hangouts, msft, etc) has been able to solve the online conf call problem. Maybe it's not solvable? And no, other solutions are terrible too (join.me, ringcentral, etc). I don't think i've ever been on a Internet-supported conf call where there hasn't been at least one major issue. My cynical mind…
I don't know what happened since that that's the high water mark.