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Microsoft is killing Skype

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Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#541

Post by Marsymars »

nneonneo wrote: post #31

I put $10 on an account over ten years ago to make sporadic calls (e.g. customer service in other countries). That account still has $5 left, and I’ve made a ton of calls to many different countries. What’s a good alternative here? I just want to make outgoing international calls cheaply.

Nearly same situation here. I recently used it to for travel logistics for a trip to Japan for some local things that didn't have online booking.

From a bit of Googling, Viber may be a reasonable alternative. They're owned by a reasonably non-shady/non-fly-by-night operation (Rakuten), have a desktop app, and let you buy credit without a subscription: https://account.viber.com/en/rates-index

Happy to hear about experiences with alternatives.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#542

Post by Liquix »

timewizard wrote: post #530
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 f…

but m$ doesn't have a monopoly on video/instant chat? teams is so objectively bad that anyone who was using skype will move on to a different company's product

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#543

Post by EA-3167 »

timewizard wrote: post #530
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 f…

Speaking of hugs, remember the mantra: "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish."

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#544

Post by DrFalkyn »

pests wrote: post #514
DrFalkyn wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly this is the culture now at tech companies. All the data has to go through company servers, whether it makes technical sense or not Pretty sure I flunked a system design question this reason. I was asked to design an online chat system. I asked of they wanted support for groups, they said no. So I gave them simple two way socket solution. Apparently that wasn’t good enough, They wanted a full DB storing everyone…

Did they want multi device? How do you sync messages? History?

You can sync with timestamps

History can be stored locally

Centralizing this just seems way more complicated to me, unless you want groups. Even then for small groups P2P isn’t such a terrible idea

Not sure what you mean by multidevice, I do t think they cared about mobile

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#545

Post by inetknght »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #538
inetknght wrote: post #531

Microsoft killed Skype when they removed its peer to peer architecture.

I keep seeing this comment in the thread, but I don’t really understand it. Sure, p2p is cool for us engineers. But why the end user ever cares about it? Microsoft’s purpose is to sell the product to as many customers as possible. If the decision was made to axe the architecture to increase the sales… it’s not the wrong decision? For us, tech snobs, we can always find an alternative anyways.

> Sure, p2p is cool for us engineers. But why the end user ever cares about it?

Skype really was the killer communication app with the killer feature: voice and video over IP, for free. It offered paid calling (for a fairly reasonable if not particularly low price), even international.

End users (other than gamers or enterprise) cared about privacy and decentralization. Not many end users, but perhaps many who made recommendations to their peers about what VoIP software to use.

At the time, the main competition was MSN (terrible UX, later merged into Skype), TeamSpeak/Ventrilo/Mumble/RogerWilco (focused on gamers and generally terrible UX), or enterprise-focused SIP software.

Later came FaceTime (Apple-only), Facebook Messenger (privacy invasive), WhatsApp (after Facebook, and basically the same as Facebook Messenger these days), Telegram (Russian spyware), and Signal (not popular).

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#546

Post by timewizard »

Liquix wrote: post #542
timewizard wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 f…

but m$ doesn't have a monopoly on video/instant chat? teams is so objectively bad that anyone who was using skype will move on to a different company's product

That they failed to successfully profit from their crime does not obviate it from being criminal. Skype was created in 2003, I do hope it's appreciated how much smaller the market was back then, on top of how bandwidth constrained it was.

On Hacker News of all places what I think gets lost in the monopoly conversation is that it's not just the consumer market you need to pay attention it's the _labor_ market. I always assumed that would more be more readily apparent here. I am often surprised to find out it is not.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#547

Post by notpushkin »

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…

> It was also available literally everywhere

I remember trying to run SkypeKit on my Kindle. Didn’t get it to make calls, but I think it received chat messages!

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#548

Post by notpushkin »

zx8080 wrote: post #529
nimish wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It does have B2C products, but does it know how to manage them?

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#549

Post by kvakerok »

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…

Pre Microsoft Skype was malware-grade good. I still remember sysadmins imploding in impotent rage as it near effortlessly evaded their firewalling attempts.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#550

Post by darkhorse222 »

randerson wrote: post #351
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…

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.

That's how I feel about Reddit. They just keeping adding things nobody wants because otherwise how do they justify their salaries and their stock price?
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