Personally I only use Skype for video calls, and sometimes for land-line calls, and it works great. I use the web client. It feels weird to read all the comments here. I think the problem is that most people use Skype as an IRC / Instant messenger / MS-messenger replacement, but MS didn't recognize that and screwed up that part of the app.
Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
341–350 of 436 posts
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#342"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…
Call quality? How about the fact that _chat_ doesn't work now? How badly do you have to screw up to lose chat messages constantly?
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#343I was mainly happy with skype, needed the combination of video, chat and screen share and skype was doing it well. The problem started when I try to share screen between business skype and regular skype, it is not working and I can't seem to find any solution for it. I don't understand why a paying business customer can't share with regular user but regular free users can share, it doesn't make sense.
Looking now for alternatives with those 3 features, video, chat and screen share, any recommendations? I tried discord but it killed my computer when trying to share a screen.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#344Every time their mobile updates I think "Well it can't get any worse"...and then the boys at MS prove me wrong.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you really want to torture yourself, try SfB on macOS. "Kafkaesque" is an apt term for all the truly bizarre ways it abuses you. My favorite recent thing - I'll hang up a call and randomly SfB will spawn about a dozen call quality survey windows for every call I've recently completed.
In our company, the SfB on Mac users have an issue where login variably takes between 5 and 30 minutes. Conferences are hilariously late because of this. Also, Mac screen sharing usually crashes after a few minutes. Sometimes calls get dropped and reconnnect just fails immediately with some weird error code until you sign out and delete all user data and log in again (waiting minutes). Chat history disabled. How we m…
> In our company, the SfB on Mac users have an issue where login variably takes between 5 and 30 minutes.
Don't worry, that's a cross-platform feature. I get it on Windows too.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#346Earlier 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 think what you say is possibly true, but like other posters here I do not recall paying for wifi in recent years and I also stay at many different hotels. I have seen services where you can pay for better throughput or for a public IP. I wonder if perhaps I and the other posters are not being charged for wifi due to "status". That is, we have been flagged by the hotel chains as valuable customers and free wifi is a perk of that status. E.e. "platinum" status or similar.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#347Earlier 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…
Backpacker hostels also generally have great free wifi.
Agree - 5 star hotels have the worst. Clunky, shitty, login procedures and laugh out loud ridiculous pricing models.
This is similar to the situation for tourist visas in various countries. The shittiest countries that you absolutely would never want to overstay in have the most difficult to obtain visas. I once got a visa to go to bangladesh - it was expensive, took 2 months to get, and I still had to bribe 2 different people when I got to dhaka airport to get through.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#348What exactly is beloved about Skype? It's been superseded in almost every possible way by most video conferencing and messenging competitors out there. It's felt like it's been on life support for the past half a decade.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#349Earlier 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…
Totally disagree. I work with HPE (went to Skype around 18 mo ago?) and other large OEMs/software publishers, and collaborating from OUTSIDE the four walls of the Skype-implementing organization has gotten atrocious. Imagine driving on 101 and need to join a call...but you realize it's Skype, so there's not a one-click call-in...you hope that the app will open but first the url opens a webpage...then you authorize opening in the app called "Business", then you try to spell your name...ugh
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#350Earlier quoted context omitted.
When both users are behind a firewall, in some cases the Skype connection was peer-to-supernode-to-peer, not straight peer-to-peer. Replacing a supernode, which could have been a user on a mediocre DSL connection, with a server in a datacenter with good connectivity _should_ improve call quality.
Yes, but if they had implemented that as a fall-back after a problem was detected I doubt anybody would have had a problem with it. Instead they routed all the traffic through their DC and for a very large number of calls that meant more hops and at least one extra latency incurring handler of the packet stream. So even if in some edge cases it was a win for a large number of calls it was a net loss.
IMHO this is exactly right. VOIP is actually super hard unless you have extremely good equipment because any latency can trip up things like echo cancellation. On top of that, you have to consider that this equipment (and its bandwidth) that is doing nothing but carrying traffic is seen to be a cost centre by organisations. Most VOIP calls result in practically no revenue. The bean counters will make decisions without understanding the impact to the service.
This was always the big advantage of Skype. Yes, supernodes are problematic (and IMHO, unethical), but on average they will work better than carrying all the traffic. When I used to work at Nortel in the 90's (now defunct telecom equipment manufacturer), I always wondered about VOIP because I knew how much trouble we had with traffic and we had circuit switched networks! Later when I worked for some VOIP startups, I could see the problems first hand.
FWIW, for voice, Mumble is still the gold standard IMHO. It's a pain to set up, but once you do, it will work extremely well. I keep threatening to build an open source VOIP system (not based on SIP, and requiring users to open ports by hand) because it's really not that hard. I've built one before for a startup from the ground up in a matter of months, by myself. Maybe one of these days...