Such incompetence. I’d prefer to use Skype so I can use my Xbox Kinect and the big TV for video chat... but I can’t make my parents figure it out. So FaceTime it is.
Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
331–340 of 436 posts
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#332I haven't been able to log into Skype since Microsoft bought it and associated user accounts with their live.com service. I can't find any account credentials, can't get a username reset / password reset, and can't create a new account, because it says my email address is already in use. It's infuriating.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolutely! I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. Didn't realise there were companies trying to use consumer Skype for their corporate calls. We have SfB handling everything at work - including PSTN - and it works fabulously all the time.
> I was reading these replies and thinking nothing made sense. You can blame Microsoft for the confusion since they renamed Lync to SfB in order to leech off the (non-enterprise) Skype brand. I wonder if they will rename SfB again should the "Skype" become more toxic.
The next name for their corporate product is MS Teams.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#334Earlier 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…
How does one play golf apocryphally?
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#335Earlier 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…
SfB was really bad upon initial release but it's gotten pretty good. No complaints.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a direct consequence of Skype going from a peer-to-peer model where the servers were just used during call set-up to a far more centralized model. I stopped using Skype shortly after Microsoft acquired it and started streaming all calls through their DC, I could see no other reason than surveillance for it.
This right here. Skype used to have amazing call experiences, then they screwed it all up. Discord atm is more reliable than Skype, but who the hell is going to use Discord under a business environment sadly?
Game developers. We use Telegram for work communication, but required to be logged in our game's Discord community during the day to reply an occasional bug report and generally engage with the community.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Any hotel nicer than your average Sheraton (Weston, W Hotels, etc.) will not have free Wi-Fi. Sheratons might not even have free Wi-Fi. Where you have been staying seem like they'd be classified as "motels" (like a Best Western Express or whatever) not actual "hotels".
I tend to stay in the nicer class of hotels, and I can't remember the last time I paid for WiFi (though there often is a paid tier available with ostensibly better throughput, and sometimes there are restrictions on # of devices or such).
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#338Am I the only one who thought pre-Microsoft skype was a poorly-functioning product?
Yes, it was horribly buggy, the Android app in particular. It would only occasionally notify you of new messages.
In the last year or two I've found it to be much more reliable, and the reviews seem to concur.
Average rating of 3.8 in 2012:
http://web.archive.org/web/20120422145525/https://play.googl...
Average rating of 4.1 today:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.skype.raid...
There are lots of anecdotal reports in these threads and in the article, but the objective evidence seems to show that people like it better today than they did in 2012.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#339Earlier 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…
I must be using a different skype for business then, ours can't even handle copy and paste from the chat window. It will regularly lose messages or send them to the wrong group. Sometimes you'll get a new message notification but the actual message will arrive several second later. It takes several seconds to close the chat window if there are a few conversations open.
And that's just the issues we have trying to send text, don't get me started on the video and audio.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I too have never stayed anywhere without free WiFi, and I travel for my work, thus I'm staying at corporate-approved hotels, for maybe 30-40 nights per year in various cities and hotel chains. And these aren't fancy hotels either, much cheaper than places I'd stay if I was on holiday enjoying myself.
The closest I've seen was a budget hotel where I stayed (not for work) after a huge party. The WiFi at that hotel was free, but it was heavily rate-limited and the rate-limits were lifted for a fee. You could use basic web pages, but Youtube wasn't possible without paying.