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Microsoft is killing Skype

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Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#521

Post by Beijinger »

qingcharles wrote: post #375
Lammy wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before. Story in two headlines: - “NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution” https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f... (2009) - “Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?” https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft…

Well, the better ask is why eBay bought it...

eBay is just a terrible company. (Yet, I like and use it more than Amazon).

ebay had Paypal. They had Skype. And Skype was a kind of social network.

eBay could have been Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, WYSE, but eBay always stayed, eBay.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#523

Post by booleandilemma »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #471
drooopy wrote: post #101

The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic to maintain or even expand their lead in video conferencing, while allowing a complete unknown (outside of the corporate world, at least) like Zoom to become the dominant platform, should be studied in business schools. The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling that, based on personal experience, it is still used in place of FaceTime…

Teams (which includes the guts of Lync... aka Skype For Business) has grown into Microsoft's behemoth (320 million active daily users while Zoom only has 200k business customers and actually declined YoY). If you are talking non-business free users then sure, Zoom comes out on top.

Doesn't Microsoft install it on every windows laptop automatically? Are they all "users"?

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#525

Post by alternatex »

DrFalkyn wrote: post #519
robin_reala wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A deaf colleague massively preferred Zoom to Teams because the video quality on Zoom allowed a lot more sign language nuance to transfer.

Zoom has live captioning at lest for the paid version

Both Skype and Teams have captioning. Skype even has voice translation that aims to reproduce the vocal timbre.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#526

Post by alternatex »

novia wrote: post #364
randerson wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Skype should be a textbook case of how a product team will keep inventing new projects to justify their continued employment, even if it means messing with a winning formula. Skype achieved perfection a year or two after the Microsoft acquisition. At that point they should have downsized the team and focused on maintenance. Instead, they kept releasing new versions, each new version being worse than the previous one.

Skype was perfect BEFORE the Microsoft acquisition. Everything afterwards was unnecessary. Source: I used Skype before and after 2011.

Group calls weren't perfect. P2P doesn't lend itself well to group calls.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#528

Post by ZeWaka »

pests wrote: post #447
hedgehog wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh it gets better. Apparently some of the stuff they didn't get dated back to Kazaa. Some of the Skype founders were under indictment and traveling incognito while they raised money for the new company.

I had interacted with Pritt Kasesalu (PrittK) when I was very young. In the late 90/early 00s I played an MMO developed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) named Subspace, released in the mid 90s. It was a top down astroids-like space game with maps of up to 100 or more players, even back then. The game shut down officially but the server leaked and became community ran. The original client was not very secure so hack…

I think you linked the wrong steam game, it's https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...

:)

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#529

Post by zx8080 »

nimish wrote: post #516
Lammy wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before. Story in two headlines: - “NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution” https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f... (2009) - “Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?” https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft…

Naw, having been there, Microsoft killed Skype because it had no idea how to manage a B2C product.

> microsoft

> had no idea how to manage a B2C product

What does this mean? MS has enough of b2c products. Windows is. Office is. Not enough?

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#530

Post by timewizard »

lxgr wrote: post #510

Skype (the original product/service, before Microsoft's corporate hug of death) was an amazing piece of technology. It was pre-cloud in every aspect, not only using P2P for actual VoIP traffic but also for contact list management and node discovery (via DHT and promoting random people's PCs to act as core nodes! Opening up Wireshark on my laptop when on fast university Wi-Fi with a public, unfirewalled IP was quite t…

> before Microsoft's corporate hug of death

Abuse of the law to buy a competitor, form a monopoly, and then price fix an entire market. It sounds cute when you say "hug of death" almost like they didn't intentionally seek out this precise outcome.

> It was also available literally everywhere

Funny how that was literally the first thing to get the axe. I guess some "hugs" are like that, huh?

> Rest in peace!

Justice for Skype!

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