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RIP Skype

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Re: RIP Skype

#51

Post by colmmacc »

aa-jv wrote: post #19
colmmacc wrote: post #14

Early one morning in August 2007 I was asleep in my apartment in Leiden and I got a call from my boss Dirk-Willem van Gulik to tell me that 1) Skype was having a global outage, 2) we had to help anyway we could, 3) scope, budget, people, nothing would get in our way. At the time we were working on Joost, a crazy startup that was founded by Skype's Janus and Niklas. We built 3 networks, in 3 countries, in a matter of…

Skype was an intelligence-gathering platform with very few equals. In the era that Skype was producing unicorn horns, surveillance capitalism was on a rocket ride. I doubt those same conditions would allow for multiple unicorn horns in the modern era. You can't build a Skype-like surveillance network now; that horse has left the barn.

At its height Skype made its money in surprising ways. There was a margin on Skype credits, which paid for calls into the regular phone system. But there was much more money in brand licensing. Time was you could buy not just "Skype certified" headsets, cameras, but even non-telephony gear like USB thumb drives. SanDisk carried those for years and I presume they out-sold the alternatives enough to be worth the licensing.

It always amazed me. What did Skype have to say about a Thumb Drive. But the brand had a lot of trust. A lot of people appreciated how simple and reliable it was, and the fun blue interface was very comforting.

On the surveillance side, it was rumored that Microsoft bought Skype in part to do a solid for the US DOJ. DOJ would get a cooperative partner for lawful interception / metadata, while Microsoft might get some relief from their anti-trust woes. But all of the principals I've ever spoken to deny this as a motivation and nothing has come out over the years to contradict that.

I do recall Microsoft putting Skype in their ads org for a long time, but not much seemed to come from that either.

Re: RIP Skype

#52

Post by neilv »

Spivak wrote: post #34
FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience? More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?

Teams as a Zoom competitor is fine. It works perfectly well as video calling / conferencing software. Teams as a Slack competitor is abysmal. Absolutely unusable for anything other than the most basic communication needs.

Most basic communication needs, if your basic needs don't include messages being communicated reliably.

Some people use these products to go through the motions of appearing to do work, and don't seem to be aware how ineffective they're being.

Whether MS office suites slot right in because the org is already dysfunctional, or whether the org is dysfunctional because MS office suites have made them that way over the years, I don't know.

Re: RIP Skype

#53

Post by _diyar »

FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #20
internet_points wrote: post #5

Let's hope Teams is next in line

Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience? More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?

Accidental Tech Podcast episode 581 [1] had a great conversation about the reason why Teams is winning: Microsoft was using their dominant position in office applications to win market share.

Specifically, they would offer Teams for free in a bundle with Office (which basically every company buys anyway). Every manager could strike Slack from their expenses, replace it with Teams and claim great success.

Microsoft has since been forced to change their tactics [2-3], but the damage is done.

[1] https://overcast.fm/+AAQ2lFdljEs/40:32 [2] https://www.ft.com/content/be838956-7038-4179-8a1c-851b83048... [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/business/european-union-m...

Re: RIP Skype

#54

Post by TiredOfLife »

gregoriol wrote: post #16
sillystu04 wrote: post #11

Skype could’ve become WhatsApp, Zoom, or Discord. In 2010 it was in the prime position to win any of those segments.

It was the "whatsapp" around 2010: everyone had an account on it, was using it's name as a word, ... and it was working really well at a time when it wasn't so common to use video chat, smartphones, ... The story only repeats again though, like MSN messenger almost a decode before. Which one will be next?

After Microsoft bought Skype they essentially rebuilt it on top of MSN messenger corpse

Re: RIP Skype

#55

Post by mrkeen »

FunnyLookinHat wrote: post #20
internet_points wrote: post #5

Let's hope Teams is next in line

Everyone I know who uses Teams does not like it. Is that selection bias based on my personal network of technically savvy peers and professionals, or is it founded in a broader experience? More importantly, does Microsoft really believe this is a winning product? Are they that out of touch with their customer base?

As of right now, search appears to be completely broken. I can see that the keyword I'm looking for is in the messages. But it won't show up via search (either from the top bar, or from the helpful "press ctrl-f to search within this channel" right-side-bar.)

The UI is aggressively debouncing, so it won't search again unless I change the query.

The UI message is "We couldn't find any results in this channel. Check for spelling, try another search keyword, or search in another channel."

Looking into the network response, I see some fun JSON:

  ...
  "error": {
        "code": "OK",
        "message": "The call failed, please try again.",
        "target": "",
        "details": [
            {
                "code": "OK",
                "message": "The call failed, please try again.",
                "target": "",
                "details": [
                    {
                        "code": "OK",
                        "message": "The call failed, please try again.",
                        "target": "",
                        "details": [
  ...

Re: RIP Skype

#56

Post by ptero »

varjag wrote: post #46
johannes1234321 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that they have working tools which work in one period, but fail to adapt to change. AIM, Yahoo, MSN etc. were mostly plain text systems, built around presence and a single client. Then came mobile phones, with unreliable connections, with messengers which allowed integrating pictures etc. and easy sign up (iMessage by using apple ID, which every iPhone user has; Whatsapp by using phone number which direc…

At any point of its existence and until its last hour, Skype was a better video call/chat product than Teams.

But that is not saying much. I wish the Teams goes the way of the dodo next.

Re: RIP Skype

#57

Post by tim333 »

Skype out was useful.

I had an account with auto top up from my card for years. I assumed they'd refund the unused credit when they closed but it seems they have decided to keep it which I feel is unsporting. About 15 euro so it won't break the bank but there should still be a general principle not to steal your clients funds.

Re: RIP Skype

#58

Post by rad_gruchalski »

seb1204 wrote: post #29
gregoriol wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the "whatsapp" around 2010: everyone had an account on it, was using it's name as a word, ... and it was working really well at a time when it wasn't so common to use video chat, smartphones, ... The story only repeats again though, like MSN messenger almost a decode before. Which one will be next?

ICQ not MSN Messenger I thought

Msn messenger was the first one doing video calls 20 years ago. I remember that, 56k dial-up modem, msn messenger and talking to randos on the other side of the planet.

Re: RIP Skype

#59

Post by tim333 »

moralestapia wrote: post #49

RIP my 50 Euros that they didn't want to re-imburse. "Just use Teams, your money will be there" ... hmmm, no thanks.

I clicked "just use teams" but no sign of my money that I can see.

Re: RIP Skype

#60

Post by benfortuna »

flynumber wrote: post #9

Microsoft really dropped the ball with Skype during Covid.. At FlyNumber we saw the decline early, we used to be able to point DID phone numbers directly to Skype accounts - it was great, of course Microsoft killed that around the time of their acquisition ... but why? All it did was force end-users to using SIP clients.

They went all-in on Teams just before the start of COVID, and MS don't typically support multiple overlapping products like Google do (although the number of task management products may be a counter-argument to that).
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