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Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

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Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#61
I'm a bit surprised about how many issues people are having with Skype. I have been using Skype quite heavily for couple of years and I'm not really seeing these issues. For me the sound quality feels really good, as long as the internet connection is ok. The messaging seems to be realiable, I haven't see lost messages or messages coming in wrong order. I'm running on multiple platforms, OSX, iOS and Windows.

BUT there is of course things that could be done better. While one-to-one calls work well, I feel that on the group calls with many participants (say 5+) are not so good.

I think Microsoft is missing a huge opportunity when they are not taking Skype further and adopting some features from Slack and Google Hangouts. Most of the technology is there, they would just need to tweak it a bit to better match the requirements. Some things I would like to see: the concept of organization and associated rooms. Possibility to push messages to these rooms from outside systems (think CI and other notifications). For group calls I prefer the way Hangouts, GoTo meeting and WebEx works. Somebody sets up the meeting and then others join. The message history and search should be improved. With Slack you start relaying that you find the old stuff from there, in Skype the search is bad and the message history does not go very far.

Now that Microsoft also happens to have LinkedIn, they would be in pretty good position to create a communication solution that would span organizations.

I'm aware about Skype for business, but also a bit suspicious about how this will turn out. Lync feels more or traditional enterprise stuff that you run inside your own network and not something for the Internet.

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#62

A personal anecdote: I had the same account on Skype for most of the last 10 years. The same username. It was stable. Lots of people could contact me reliably. It was an account that was created long before Skype was bought by Microsoft. Then came the update that they pushed out last year. Now everyone needed a Microsoft ID to login. There was some kind of "improvement" in the way authentication was done. So I had to…

I have a similar issue with Minecraft every few months. I have a Minecraft.net account and a Mojang.com account. I'll spend 15 or so minutes setting passwords across both accounts, never really sure where I should put things. Maybe Microsoft will make it one account instead of three.

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#63
What are people using for video chat? I use it so rarely (maybe once a year) that every time I do, I have to learn some new software, install stuff, sign up for accounts, etc.

Facebook messenger is great for talking with my niece, but that's not appropriate for business. I ended up using Facetime most recently. That only works if I bring my personal computer to work.

I had the same experience as @lkrubner when I tried Skype. I didn't spend anywhere near two hours on it - I gave up after ten minutes.

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#64
post #24

It is pretty much assumed by almost everyone out there that Skype is fully under surveillance and intercepted. If you care in the slightest bit about security, don't use Skype. Other than that I find it useful for keeping in contact with friends and family. For gossip and inane chatter it works well.

Yeah I also don't use skype to discuss my evil world domination plans!

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#65
post #26
post #6

What stable alternatives do we have for a pure P2P? Tox still doesn't persist group chats, yet. I hope someone will come up with an implementation of Riffle.

The recent introduction of WebRTC to browsers could throw Skype off its throne. You pretty much just go on the webpage of such a WebRTC-service, start up a conversation, which generates you a link, then you send that link to your conversation partner and they just have to open this link in their browser to join the conversation. That's so incredibly simple to use, that it should be much less of a problem to get peopl…

https://appear.in - doesn't even require a login!

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#66
post #33

A personal anecdote: I had the same account on Skype for most of the last 10 years. The same username. It was stable. Lots of people could contact me reliably. It was an account that was created long before Skype was bought by Microsoft. Then came the update that they pushed out last year. Now everyone needed a Microsoft ID to login. There was some kind of "improvement" in the way authentication was done. So I had to…

>I am a professional computer programmer. If I can't figure out how to reset a password on Skype, then what are the chances that a less technical person can do it? Had the same experience with the german postal service a few week ago. When you register there, you register for their shitty amazon-clone aswell. Turns out, you have only one account with one passwort, but the two sites have different password polices. My…

My hoster introduced a web firewall, which thought my password was a SQL injection and gave me a plain 403 but was disabled when authenticated so allowed me to change my password to something offending again. Had a funny conversation with them where they insisted that this was beneficial, because SQL injections can happen as humans make mistakes.

A few days before that another hoster updated its password policy and sent me a less secure password by mail. He also insisted that since he uses SMTP over SSL, there is nothing wrong with that.

And on a not related note: The technical support lead of my dedicated mail hoster does not understand DKIM.

I was trying to be reasonable and not focus on stuff others can do better, but it seems like you have to do everything by yourself if you want it done right.

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#67
Skype is my go-to example of why software quality matters.

They dominated the market. Tons and tons of people had Skype accounts and, to this day, "Skype" is informally used as a generic verb for videoconferencing.

The problem is that the quality has fallen substantially over time. Now things like http://appear.in are much better solutions for basic videoconferencing and Slack has eaten the communications space which Slack should have owned.

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#68
post #63

What are people using for video chat? I use it so rarely (maybe once a year) that every time I do, I have to learn some new software, install stuff, sign up for accounts, etc. Facebook messenger is great for talking with my niece, but that's not appropriate for business. I ended up using Facetime most recently. That only works if I bring my personal computer to work. I had the same experience as @lkrubner when I trie…

My (small) gaming group recently migrated from Skype to Hangouts for both in-game stuff (voice) and minor tech support (screen sharing).

The screen sharing is vastly superior compared to Skype, and text is actually readable (1080p screens on both ends), and I would assume that that translates to video calls as well!

For the in-game stuff the kicker was that one day my computer stopped getting notified of the group calls existing at all. But after the transition even the most reluctant one commented on how much nicer the sound quality was.

Of course, I'd have preferred to use Mumble where possible, but somehow I suspect that that would have been an even harder sell. :/

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#69
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone needs security, and privacy I'm so tired of this, no I don't, at least not as much as so many people think I need. No, I don't care if my Netflix password is easily crackable, and no I don't care if the US government reads my Skype chats! Why am I not allowed to make that choice, to use Skype and be okay with the convenience tradeoff? I agree that I should have the choice, but if I do choose to use somethi…

"I don't need free speech, don't have anything to say."

"I don't need free speech all the time."

Re: Skype finalizes its move to the cloud, ignores the elephant in the room

#70
post #42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone needs security, and privacy I'm so tired of this, no I don't, at least not as much as so many people think I need. No, I don't care if my Netflix password is easily crackable, and no I don't care if the US government reads my Skype chats! Why am I not allowed to make that choice, to use Skype and be okay with the convenience tradeoff? I agree that I should have the choice, but if I do choose to use somethi…

Actually, if everybody knew that a channel is insecure, it would make it a lot less dangerous. The problem is: most of people need it to be safer, and there is no real option.

> The problem is: most of people need it to be safer, and there is no real option.

You'll have to elaborate on how this is A) true, and B) there are no options. I can think of a dozen better options than Skype.

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