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Microsoft is killing Skype

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Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#561

Post by areyourllySorry »

geocar wrote: post #347
tombert wrote: post #312

Damn, this is the primary way I talk to my parents and my grandmother. Genuine question, what do people here recommend as a replacement for non-technical people? I'll need to walk my grandmother through the process of setting something remotely. No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out, and I'd need something that can run on a computer. I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing…

> No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out, So FaceTime lets you make a link that you can give to someone with a web browser and they can use it to reach you, and it works pretty well. You might just try it. > I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is online" status thing like Skype does. That's pr…

signal also allows you to turn off discovery by phone number.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#562

Post by brailsafe »

That's kind of a shame, although the product has obviously been neglected, I still used it on mobile to make local calls over wifi while I'm travelling internationally. The app is... rough, but it gets the job done.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#563

Post by prinny_ »

I am still lowkey mad about how Microsoft handled Skype. They acquired a great piece of tech that was widely popular and used and they straight up butchered it. I was unable to fathom why version 7.2 dropped lists, when up at this point I was able to create lists of my contacts. I could not understand why when searching for someone using their name, the search results would show me people from other countries sharing a same name before showing me the person from my contact list. They bought it to degrade it and then destroy it, so that they could push for Teams. It worked, but from a consumer's perspective that was just disheartening.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#564

Post by LorenPechtel »

tombert wrote: post #312

Damn, this is the primary way I talk to my parents and my grandmother. Genuine question, what do people here recommend as a replacement for non-technical people? I'll need to walk my grandmother through the process of setting something remotely. No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is out, and I'd need something that can run on a computer. I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing…

Yeah, it used to be how she kept in touch with her family. Now most of them are on WeChat but once in a while we dust off the credit she still has and use it to call someone she doesn't have a WeChat contact for. The last time we used it the experience was bad--wouldn't stay signed in, multiple annoyances in the way of simply making a call. You don't need to tell us every time that 911 won't trace properly!

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#565

Post by [deleted] »

Lammy wrote: post #475
pests wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amusingly KaZaA itself was one of my first experiences using an “alternative” client for something. There was KaZaA Lite which removed the bundled Cydoor malware, K++ which added hax features like unlimited searches and forced 1000 node reputation, and the most famous KaZaA Lite K++ which did both. Lots of others too like “KL Extensions”, K-Sig, K-Dat, but those were the two big ones.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#567

Post by Nullabillity »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #465
smallerfish wrote: post #453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if all you need is a 1-1 call without NAT traversal. That part of your sentence is doing a lot of work. It has to be as easy as clicking on a contact for oldsters.

That's the point. That's why Skype had supernodes, and that's why Skype on mobiles meant that Microsoft needed to run its own supernodes. At that point, you might as well add features like multiparty video calls, and then it makes no sense to have your users install supernodes software.

Skype mobile didn't matter as long as you still have a decent pool of desktop users online.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#568

Post by echelon »

kvakerok wrote: post #549
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.

2000's era P2P was wickedly good.

P2P was such an interesting part of internet history. It's a shame client-server prevailed over it.

Decentralized systems are so much more liberating. It felt like being a part of something rather than being a serf in someone's platform.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#569

Post by richardwhiuk »

ranger207 wrote: post #439
high_na_euv wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missed? They grew Teams, lol. Zoom - wtf, who the hell uses it after. Discord would be better example since it is huge, even LLVM community uses it

My company uses Teams and Zoom. Every Teams meeting is a disaster compared to Zoom. At least it's not Amazon Chime. IDK how AWS Support survives that

Amazon are eoling chime

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#570

Post by jacobgkau »

Lammy wrote: post #420
falcor84 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, a bit over a decade ago I had installed logmein on my parents' computer to be able to easily help them with any IT issues. But they since pivoted away from personal accounts and I never found anything else as straightforward. I feel that in a lot of ways tech has regressed. EDIT: I just found that logmein actually offer a personal product again, named GoToMyPC, but what used to be entirely free at…

> I just found that logmein actually offer a personal product again, named GoToMyPC I 'member this being advertized on TechTV back in The Day. It's interesting to see the focus on PDAs now that the product category is entirely dead: https://web.archive.org/web/20031209031959/http://www.techtv... …but didn't realize it's quite as old as it is (1998) and had never heard of “ExpertCity”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go…

> It's interesting to see the focus on PDAs now that the product category is entirely dead:

In the context of screen sharing, I guess smartphones are the evolution of what they meant by "Pocket PC". Sure, the mobile remote desktop use-case is a little niche, but the product class isn't dead, it was just reinvented.

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