Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 436 posts

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#41

Post by kuschku »

std_throwaway wrote: post #37
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…

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…

They switched from P2P to a hosted model because suddenly CGNATs showed up everywhere on the internet with no way through them.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#42

Post by crb002 »

patrickg_zill wrote: post #22

My view in the past was, that MSFT was essentially paid by the NSA to buy Skype and then remove the ability to make secure calls with it, by sending all the media (audio/video) through centralized servers that could easily tap the calls. Am I incorrect in that? Previously, Skype was peer-to-peer after the call was setup, with Skype servers only helping in setting up the call (essentially updating the registry of "who…

Does someone have a good writeup of this? Engineering wise they could still do peer to peer, but also send lower sampled audio to a central server via UDP, code it into text, then send it to the other client and brand it as an accessibility feature. Fast connection with NSA logs :)

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#43

Post by StreamBright »

gambiting wrote: post #18
mnkypete wrote: post #4

Um.. I'm not sure the article author is familiar with the fact that "Skype for business" (the "complex" one) is actually home grown and was just rebranded from Lync. This is not at all the same as the consumer Skype, which actually tries to be a weird mixup between Snapchat and whatnot at the moment (failing utterly of course). Skype for Business (+ PSTN calling) is actually pretty great on Office 365 tbh...

I work at a large corporation where we use Skype For Business and I swear, this is probably the worst piece of software I have ever used. They can't get basic things right - I can send a message to my coworker right now, and it will appear in the list of messages on his machine somewhere in between past messages. For a while, we had someone who couldn't receive any attachments, skype would just say "failed sending" -…

Same here, Skype for Business is such a big overhead that people started to riot against it and we are going to replace it with something that works. "failed sending" is an every day issue, Mac client cannot record, mobile version drains battery like crazy, just to mention the top pain points.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#44

Post by Aardwolf »

I don't think this has anything to do with "Skype for business"?

At least from my perception what happened was that a program+app that once simply just allowed two persons to talk or videochat between phones and/or PCs, became more bloated, buggier and more demanding, forcing people to look for a simpler better working alternative.

This alternative seems currently whatsapp. Til that one becomes too bloated and buggy I guess. Then there'll be a next one.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#45

Post by fhood »

gambiting wrote: post #18
mnkypete wrote: post #4

Um.. I'm not sure the article author is familiar with the fact that "Skype for business" (the "complex" one) is actually home grown and was just rebranded from Lync. This is not at all the same as the consumer Skype, which actually tries to be a weird mixup between Snapchat and whatnot at the moment (failing utterly of course). Skype for Business (+ PSTN calling) is actually pretty great on Office 365 tbh...

I work at a large corporation where we use Skype For Business and I swear, this is probably the worst piece of software I have ever used. They can't get basic things right - I can send a message to my coworker right now, and it will appear in the list of messages on his machine somewhere in between past messages. For a while, we had someone who couldn't receive any attachments, skype would just say "failed sending" -…

I can not agree with you more. Skype for business has is an unmitigated disaster of a piece of software and whatever team is in charge of it needs to be fired or relocated so that Microsoft can start over on it.

Skype for business is so insultingly bad that it is pretty much the only piece of widely used software that I am willing to claim that given a month I could write something far better.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#46

Post by erikb »

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…

Yes, but why do you think that this is not related? I'd say call quality and usability of a call service are strongly related.

Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand

#49

Post by jacquesm »

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…

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.

Post reply on HN