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Microsoft is killing Skype

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Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#601

Post by geocar »

paulddraper wrote: post #433
geocar wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

FaceTime requires the initiator have a Mac. Mac users can call others. Others cannot call Mac.

Exactly wrong in every way. FaceTime requires the Mac or iPhone or iPad user create a link. It's a regular (persistent but revokable) link to a web page with javascript and shit, but anyone can click the link which initiates the call; Others can call Mac, it's Mac which can't call others.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#602

Post by stavros »

1970-01-01 wrote: post #588
echelon wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>2000's era P2P was wickedly good. I think it's only the WWW that went from wickedly good to sour and evil. The P2P world is just as good as it used to be, just not as force-fed and loud as the unhinged hellscape that is Web 2.0. If you look, you will probably find whatever you're looking for with just a DHT link.

What would you recommend these days? All I know is 2000s software like Shareaza, LimeWire, Gnutella, etc.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#603

Post by petepete »

tshaddox wrote: post #452
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…

Didn't Microsoft Teams soundly defeat Zoom, Slack, and all the others? I was under the impression that Teams has at least an order of magnitude more active users than any competitor.

Teams has more users but most of those users didn't choose Teams - it was thrust upon them.

When it's bundled with O365 and shares admin tools, accounts etc, there's no wonder companies pick it.

I don't know anyone who uses it outside of work.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#604

Post by recursivecaveat »

moltopoco wrote: post #206
kleiba wrote: post #130

Teams is a heavyweight behemoth with awful UX while Skype orginally had a very lightweight feel to it. Of course, Microsoft had to kill that through various UI "improvements". Also, Skype has an official Linux client. Instead of developing Teams (NIH at its best), they could have carefully developed Skype into a similar platform. But I'm not sure a giant like Microsoft is capable of something like this. But at least…

The award for the most absurd "UI improvement" must go to the Skype iPhone app that was painstakingly rewritten so that it felt like a Windows Phone app, complete with gestures that didn't make sense to iOS users: https://www.neowin.net/news/skype-for-ios-completely-redesig... It was actually technically impressive, just...why??

It's a funny kind of myopia that causes companies to generate 'consistency' in ways that only make sense internally rather from customers' perspectives. 100% of Skype on IOS users interact with other IOS apps, vs some considerably smaller amount use Skype on Windows Phone or even Windows Desktop. When the conventions disagree the choice should be obvious...

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#605

Post by znpy »

Flameancer wrote: post #575
threePointFive wrote: post #559

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish that were true. Every enterprise I've seen has thrown their hands up and said "we already use microsoft for everything else (generally email, ad, or office) and teams is bundled why would we use anything else". So instead of getting good chat and VoIP apps, the decision makers just stick with the cheapest option (Teams, they're already paying for it in one of their tens of other Microsoft subscriptions)

Didn’t MSFT recently uncouple teams license from O365? I think you now need a separate license to use business teams, but also why use anything else.

Yes, they did. They were forced by the eu commission to do so as bundling teams was an anti-competitive practice, similar to when Microsoft bundled internet explorer into windows, effectively killing the market for web browsers.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#606

Post by tomjen3 »

bayindirh wrote: post #106
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…

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. It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much. After it's marred, they didn't try to mend it much, and when it started to work well due to better bandwidth, they didn't push it back a…

Skype was born in a world of laptops and either wireless or otherwise unmetered internet. You can have a P2P system there.

In a world where the primary interface is a mobile phone, you can't just run a piece of software on a mobile phone. If you do that Skype will just be known as the app that completely destroys your battery randomly and for no seeming reason.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#607

Post by SideQuark »

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…

Skype was founded 2003, wholly bought by eBay in 2005. MS bought it from eBay in 2011, when Skype had 30m users, which was and is tiny compared to relevant markets for videoconferencing. Even now Teams has around 30% of the market. In the 14 years since the purchase MS increased Skype usage significantly and brought the tech to a vastly bigger audience.

So no, there was never a monopoly, the market share was vastly too low to “price fix an entire market,” and “the hug of death” certainly doesn’t mean making a product better and more used and only shuttering it after 14 years when it’s been vastly outclassed (Skype usage sits at around 1%, and Zoom completely slaughtered it). Most tech fails much quicker.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#608

Post by TZubiri »

remram wrote: post #594
TZubiri wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It has a data mining AI. You are not the customer." You got most of the tokens right, but windows is a paid product, try that with meta or google products and you got it.

It is sold to integrators, not customers. No one walks into a store and buys a Windows for their computer at home, they buy a computer that has Windows already on it.

Same with car engines

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#609

Post by jrcplus »

legitster wrote: post #270

Skype is the epitome of technical debt. Millions of lines of code for a service that isn't technically difficult to provide anymore. When I was at Microsoft, I was told working on Skype was about as popular as being sent to a gulag. The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.

I worked at Skype from eBay to Microsoft. The clients were rewritten, sometimes from scratch, sometimes redesigned to chase after the latest UI trend. But rewriting clients didn't address the fact that the OG widely successful Skype was fundamentally peer-to-peer. There were no servers, only supernodes.

After smartphones took off, management was reluctant to ditch P2P and move to a client-server model, for both business (running servers costs money, and remember Skype mostly made money on calling PSTN) and technical reasons (P2P was at the heart of Skype). Internally, engineers had Skype working "in the cloud", but it took years of waffling (middle management was distracted by the introduction of Scrum; don't get me started about that; upper management was distracted by the company getting bought and sold twice) before slowly turning around the big ship.

By then, the A/V part of the tech had become commoditized, and plenty of free alternatives (namely FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat) had appeared on the scene, with better business models. No amount of rewriting code and building from scratch addressed that latter part. Management was very interested in finding new ways of making money, but it was also (for better or worse) very reluctant and careful in introducing ads into the UI.

Re: Microsoft is killing Skype

#610

Post by grrowl »

hbn wrote: post #491
Timpy wrote: post #240

Back in the Windows 7 days I installed Skype on my parents computer before moving abroad, their user experience was basically like receiving a phone call. Even though they weren't tech savvy we never had any issues. I would call them, and if they were home and near the computer, they could answer it and we'd be video chatting. A year or so ago I found this to be impossible, there was no application for desktop that w…

Do they not want to use a smartphone? FaceTime is about as seamless an experience as you can get, and it's basically like receiving a phone call because it's indeed a call on a phone!

My grandparents were terrible at smartphones. To them, it's like a landline phone, but you have to charge it every 1-2 days. Yet my grandpa was decent at PC, and email, and so on, as it was in "a place" and easy to drive.
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