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Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
81–90 of 436 posts
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#82"Since acquiring Skype from private equity investors, Microsoft has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market, a change that has made Skype less intuitive and harder to use ..." This is absolutely not the bulk of the problem: simply put, the call quality is horrendous and dropping calls in the middle of the meeting is quite common. Modus operandi in most Skype conference calls in our company is to…
Our solution was to switch to Discord for our remote meetings, which is a VoIP app targeted at gamers. Works flawlessly once you tweak the auto-ducking settings.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a direct consequence of Skype going from a peer-to-peer model where the servers were just used during call set-up to a far more centralized model. I stopped using Skype shortly after Microsoft acquired it and started streaming all calls through their DC, I could see no other reason than surveillance for it.
It's actually the other way around. "SuperNodes" (elective service as a kind of hub) caused lots of dropped calls and flaky connections because people were trying to do it on bad home connections. Microsoft switched to centralized servers to _increase_ call quality.
Well, that may have been their reason but I had excellent service on Skype prior to the acquisition super nodes and all and absolutely rotten service afterwards.
So whatever they tried to fix it didn't work. Of course this is all from a European perspective and the broadband situation here could not be compared to the US at the time (and in some places still can't).
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
I work at a large corporation where we use Skype For Business and I swear, this is probably the worst piece of software I have ever used. They can't get basic things right - I can send a message to my coworker right now, and it will appear in the list of messages on his machine somewhere in between past messages. For a while, we had someone who couldn't receive any attachments, skype would just say "failed sending" -…
To be fair, if you just mess with the registry and corrupt it, you should expect weird problems.
Except that it wasn't anything we have done, and reinstalling the entire product multiple times didn't fix the issue.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#85"Since acquiring Skype from private equity investors, Microsoft has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market, a change that has made Skype less intuitive and harder to use ..." This is absolutely not the bulk of the problem: simply put, the call quality is horrendous and dropping calls in the middle of the meeting is quite common. Modus operandi in most Skype conference calls in our company is to…
To be fair, we do that same “handshake” with google hangouts.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#86I switched to signal for calls to android users and facetime for everything else a long time ago.
Long term, I’m rooting for signal, but their video chat stuff for iOS is a hot mess (low speakerphone volume, front facing camera only). In the short term, I’m considering buying an iPad for my parents, specifically for facetime.
Both are preferable to skype by a large margin. Every time I opened it for the last year or so before I gave up, it went through “this device is authenticated, but probably stolen” login hoops.
This was before they overhauled the app, and saw the big nosedive in ratings. I’m definitely not going back to that platform.
Maybe I’ll add the signal foundation to my list of charities his year.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#87new Skype is awful, but you can still use the old interface from this page https://www.skype.com/en/get-skype/ - choose "Get Classic Skype" hope they continue to support the old interface
I'm only offered "classic Skype for Win10 mobile" (not my definition of classic!), or regular Skype for iPhone or Android.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a direct consequence of Skype going from a peer-to-peer model where the servers were just used during call set-up to a far more centralized model. I stopped using Skype shortly after Microsoft acquired it and started streaming all calls through their DC, I could see no other reason than surveillance for it.
It's actually the other way around. "SuperNodes" (elective service as a kind of hub) caused lots of dropped calls and flaky connections because people were trying to do it on bad home connections. Microsoft switched to centralized servers to _increase_ call quality.
>> Microsoft switched to centralized servers to _increase_ call quality.
Or to better address their CALEA requirements. It was about surveillance. It still is. The number of telephony decisions that are based on "security" boggles the mind.
Why did Skype fail? Because I wouldn't trust Microsoft to protect my grocery list.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#89My view in the past was, that MSFT was essentially paid by the NSA to buy Skype and then remove the ability to make secure calls with it, by sending all the media (audio/video) through centralized servers that could easily tap the calls. Am I incorrect in that? Previously, Skype was peer-to-peer after the call was setup, with Skype servers only helping in setting up the call (essentially updating the registry of "who…
It’s hard to remember back to those days but there was a huge legal/congressional pushback against p2p technology driven by the big media companies who saw p2p as the core enabler of file sharing. One side effect was the legal risks of providing p2p services were looking way heavier than traditional client service services. Skype was also heavily used in those days by people who wanted “anonymity” not from the government but from other users on the web. The old p2p architecture allowed users to discover each other’s IP addresses and either attack or discover identities of the other person on the call. I won’t for a moment pretend to say I think Microsoft has made good decisions around Skype (the UI is an unmitigated disaster that somehow still manages to get worse with each new release), but I do believe there were a ton of reasons back in the era of their switch from p2p to client server architectures that did make it the legitimately correct engineering decision in that moment. That’s nowhere near as fun an answer as the NSA conspiracy theories, but engineering decisions don’t have to be fun.
Re: Microsoft Turned Consumers Against the Skype Brand
#90What I find most interesting about Skype is that it rose from the ashes of Kazaa, and as far as I can remember was originally using a similar/same backend and peer to peer protocols to facilitate the calls. When MS got I think they removed the peer-to-peer elements (which made skype great) and made it a centralised service. At least that is my recollection of events.
Yep, it used kazaa "supernodes" as servers for call setup and finding other nodes. Read an article about this a long time ago where someone reverse engineered it. There was also a lot of details about how Skype contained a shitload of anti reverse engineering techniques.