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Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

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Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#351

Post by jodrellblank »

ConceptJunkie wrote: post #289
badpun wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In case of my company (a 40k employees multinational), everybody gets to suffer from Skype for Business' ridiculousness, I'm guessing even the people who bought it (heck, I'm guessing even the CEO is cursing it on a regular basis). Still, we use it.

And this is proof that Microsoft is still a monopoly, because they can still force people to use software they don't want. Microsoft's biggest accomplishment in technology in the last 20 years is to teach everyone that software is horrible and there's nothing that can be done about it.

Windows, macOS and iOS quality usability and discoverability have dropped year on year, Linux usability has stayed abhorrent, every major website I use that has done a big redesign has made it worse for me with more focus on whitespace, style, hiding UI elements, and adverts than substance and usability. Google search experience has gone seriously downhill, Amazon's marketplace and search has increasing quality problems, Facebook's redesigns are much hated, Reddit's redesign has hidden UI features and turned it into a bloated whitespace-obsessed ad-heavy image-centric style. Chrome, Firefox, the hiding of useful UI elements, the increasing resource demands.

Software is horrible.

Software that looked like Excel 2000 with visible accelerators was clean, easy to use, discoverable, fast, not very aesthetically pleasing but at least consistent. macOS of 5+ years ago was more human-friendly.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#352

Post by gesman »

sunstone wrote: post #285

Skype was bought during the era of Ballmer and it was quite predictably going to deteriorate. Almost immediately Microsoft re-architected skype from being peer-to-peer to a central server backend. The primary purpose for doing this seemed pretty clearly to make eavesdropping easier. Some suspected at the time that Microsoft was acting as a proxy for the US government in taking over Skype because otherwise the busines…

^^^ This.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#353

Post by dzonga »

braythwayt wrote: post #163
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…

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…

I have been trying to find that Spolsky article, please link it up if you can

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#354

Post by smackfu »

israrkhan wrote: post #182
std_throwaway wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how software can get this much worse. Having done absolutely nothing would have left Skype in a better shape than what we have now. What did they do with it? Do they not regression test? Are they letting each new intern add a new feature while nobody really cares about quality? Did they just replace the old software with a new bug-riddled software that's getting pushed out the door without quality…

This happened because they migrated skype from a peer to peer software to centralized servers. While this has enabled certain innovations, like web-based skype and better integeration with other devices, it negatively impacted overall quality of skype.

Slack did the same thing with the ScreenHero service they acquired and it had the same effect: much more lag and worse quality.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#355

Post by imartin2k »

Every time I launch Skype, I recieve messages from some 2-3 contacts linking to malware (always different people). This has been going on for a very long time and shows to me the demise of this once beloved tool. It’s basically unusable. The only reason why I keep it is because of SkypeIn & SkypeOut (calling phones and having a German phone number connected to my account).

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#357

Post by monocasa »

saagarjha wrote: post #275
israrkhan wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened because they migrated skype from a peer to peer software to centralized servers. While this has enabled certain innovations, like web-based skype and better integeration with other devices, it negatively impacted overall quality of skype.

Why can you not have a peer-to-peer Skype that works on the web?

WebRTC didn't exist at the time.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#358

Post by monocasa »

dmitriid wrote: post #302
israrkhan wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happened because they migrated skype from a peer to peer software to centralized servers. While this has enabled certain innovations, like web-based skype and better integeration with other devices, it negatively impacted overall quality of skype.

You can't have peer-to-peer and expect it to work on mobile phones.

Why not? The signaling layer DHT probably shouldn't be on the phone clients, but everything else should be fine.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#359

Post by lokedhs »

jngreenlee wrote: post #349
eksemplar wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 op…

Also, when clicking on their "web client", you immediately get a cab file (windows installer file) download request. I'm on Linux. What am I supposed to do with that file?

It's like the SfB team still lives in the "everybody uses Windows" mindset of the 90's.

The only alternative on Linux is tel.red, which works, but only for an incredibly loose definition of the word "work". I've never used a buggier piece of software.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#360

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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