9 ms·

Why was it hard to deliver messages to iphone using p2p? I mean I guess they couldn't open ports and listen for messages, but that should have been true for ple

by im2w1l 11y ago

Why was it hard to deliver messages to iphone using p2p? I mean I guess they couldn't open ports and listen for messages, but that should have been true for plenty of NATed systems too right?

joshyeager 11y ago
We used Skype IM for a long time (inertia). It wasn't just the iPhone. Skype message delivery was erratic on all platforms. It got better, but even now there are occasional delivery delays when I chat with someone who hasn't switched over (we use Slack now).
- gregdoesit 11y ago
  Yes, there are still traces of the p2p code. Most of messaging has been migrated to server based back ends, but there are still some hybrid solutions in place. Funny thing the company DNA, P2P is still haunting Skype.
  - johansch 11y ago
    The windows client still has funny bugs like: 1. You receive a message from someone. (wait a few hours) 2. You open this tab/read the message 3. The number of unread messages counter doesn't update.
    - bananaboy 11y ago
      That's been happening to me a lot lately. I've noticed that I have to right-click the conversation and click "Mark as read". Very annoying.
    - kuschku 11y ago
      At least the windows client does something. The linux client... well, for the longest time you could be lucky if it would even work. After years of not updating the bundled libraries, they stopped interfacing well with the ones in the system. And then there was an update, which changed nothing, except for introducing ads on linux and disabling video chat for most cases. The issue of skype might not be P2P, it sounds more like it was a lack of ability to provide a stable product of any kind. The Android app was also the worst app I had seen for many years. Who the hell seriously builds their own UI toolkit, and then makes it work worse than the one bundled with the OS?
      - ricksplat 11y ago
        I have to disagree .. I used the Linux client extensively between 2008 and 2013 and it was just fine. There was an issue that caused it to hang and use 100% of it's assigned CPU from time to time but I was able to write a little watchdog script for that (: Could be it fell apart more recently than that but I think that could have been said of Skype in general ...
rgbrgb 11y ago
Guessing it was because both phones need to have the app open at the same time. Skype's main p2p tech was built for the real-time synchronous chat use-case (like AIM), as opposed to the chat-log in the cloud use-case (like Slack).
- gregdoesit 11y ago
  Exactly. In hindsight we should have just built a separate messaging layer with a server backend like everyone else was doing. However Skype had no history of running servers. Just keeping the login servers up and running (a handful of them) was enough of a challenge. Plus when the company's success and revenue was driven by the P2P team and they said the same layer will work for messages... there was no one strong enough to argue. And when it was obvious that Skype messaging was sub par, the company just went in denial. "We aren't really competing with Whatsapp, because they don't do video" got us another year or two of not doing too much about the root cause. It was after the Microsoft aquisition when some MS architects told the engineers upfront that p2p and realtime messaging - forget about it.
  - JoBrad 11y ago
    I'm not sure if this story has been told this plainly elsewhere, but it probably should. I know plenty of people who got very paranoid of Skype after MS bought them.
  - kpil 11y ago
    I think the denial is the important lession here. Plenty of people knew it didn't fly, and it couldn't have been that hard to fix it if you really wanted to do it, if you were prepared to drop p2p. But still it was a hard descision to make. Why do you think it's like that?
    - gregdoesit 11y ago
      I think it was denial that messaging itself would be more inportant then video calling. Skype got massive because of video (and audio) calls. That was our main differentiator, and what helped us grow. P2P really excelled there. Messaging was built as almost an afterthought and supporting feature, piggybacking on whatever infrastructure we already had in place. And of course it didn't help that there was no one person or team in charge of the user experience who would call out that we have far inferior messaging experience then... any of our competitors, really. Even when we did - and aquired GroupMe to do something about it - we then still had the false sense of security and not needing to hurry, because user numbers were still growing upwards. And when they slowed down, it was too late.
gregdoesit 11y ago
The problem was the avalibity when the sender was offline. You send a message from your iPhone to your friend who has an Android. Your friend doesn't have reception, and after sending the message you kill Skype b/c of the battery drain (otherwise it is being part of the p2p network). Your friend now gets reception and will get your message... between a minute and a couple of hours. Most likely when you turn your phone back on, as the p2p network was not designed to store and propagate offline messages. Meanwhile someone at Whatsapp built a key value pair on a server and if you had reception, you got the messages immediately and reliably. Oh, yeah, because the read and unread message states in Skype also propagated via the p2p network and also got took a while to arrive...
- 3pt14159 11y ago
  I'm really surprised that Skype didn't just build a separate system for mobile. It seems even a simple evaluation of the facts (needing hundreds of engineers to alter an already stable product) pushes things more to the server side than the P2P side.
  - 21p 11y ago
    hindsight is 20/20. It would be quite easy for a team of developers and product managers to get together to discuss "how we take what we have and extend it to cover the new use case" rather than "what is the best approach for the new use case".
    - firebones 11y ago
      But even before reuse, the "DNA" point can't be overlooked, though. Success breeds a belief that "our differentiators" need to be considered and baked into subsequent products. More often than not, those constraints lead to situations where you're fitting a square peg into a round hole, as with Skype and P2P messaging. What saves some companies from this is a core DNA that can be interpreted in a very liberal and malleable fashion. For instance, Amazon is about distribution--be it products, bits, computing power. Facebook is about social connection (not P2P or a particular narrowing of tech). Of course, maybe that's just survivorship bias...no one keeps a good directory of the graveyard of corporate DNA that was as similarly broad. Now whether that is a function of articulating flexible DNA, or the flexibility of the decision makers...I don't know. Either way, fixed mindsets close down adaptivity to new opportunities.
pbreit 11y ago
Your is a perfect example of the original posting and the comment you are replying to. People have such a hard time acknowledging what they don't know.

by im2w1l 11y ago

Why was it hard to deliver messages to iphone using p2p? I mean I guess they couldn't open ports and listen for messages, but that should have been true for plenty of NATed systems too right?

joshyeager 11y ago

We used Skype IM for a long time (inertia). It wasn't just the iPhone. Skype message delivery was erratic on all platforms. It got better, but even now there are occasional delivery delays when I chat with someone who hasn't switched over (we use Slack now).

gregdoesit 11y ago
Yes, there are still traces of the p2p code. Most of messaging has been migrated to server based back ends, but there are still some hybrid solutions in place. Funny thing the company DNA, P2P is still haunting Skype.
- johansch 11y ago
  The windows client still has funny bugs like: 1. You receive a message from someone. (wait a few hours) 2. You open this tab/read the message 3. The number of unread messages counter doesn't update.
  - bananaboy 11y ago
    That's been happening to me a lot lately. I've noticed that I have to right-click the conversation and click "Mark as read". Very annoying.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    At least the windows client does something. The linux client... well, for the longest time you could be lucky if it would even work. After years of not updating the bundled libraries, they stopped interfacing well with the ones in the system. And then there was an update, which changed nothing, except for introducing ads on linux and disabling video chat for most cases. The issue of skype might not be P2P, it sounds more like it was a lack of ability to provide a stable product of any kind. The Android app was also the worst app I had seen for many years. Who the hell seriously builds their own UI toolkit, and then makes it work worse than the one bundled with the OS?
    - ricksplat 11y ago
      I have to disagree .. I used the Linux client extensively between 2008 and 2013 and it was just fine. There was an issue that caused it to hang and use 100% of it's assigned CPU from time to time but I was able to write a little watchdog script for that (: Could be it fell apart more recently than that but I think that could have been said of Skype in general ...

rgbrgb 11y ago

Guessing it was because both phones need to have the app open at the same time. Skype's main p2p tech was built for the real-time synchronous chat use-case (like AIM), as opposed to the chat-log in the cloud use-case (like Slack).

gregdoesit 11y ago
Exactly. In hindsight we should have just built a separate messaging layer with a server backend like everyone else was doing. However Skype had no history of running servers. Just keeping the login servers up and running (a handful of them) was enough of a challenge. Plus when the company's success and revenue was driven by the P2P team and they said the same layer will work for messages... there was no one strong enough to argue. And when it was obvious that Skype messaging was sub par, the company just went in denial. "We aren't really competing with Whatsapp, because they don't do video" got us another year or two of not doing too much about the root cause. It was after the Microsoft aquisition when some MS architects told the engineers upfront that p2p and realtime messaging - forget about it.
- JoBrad 11y ago
  I'm not sure if this story has been told this plainly elsewhere, but it probably should. I know plenty of people who got very paranoid of Skype after MS bought them.
- kpil 11y ago
  I think the denial is the important lession here. Plenty of people knew it didn't fly, and it couldn't have been that hard to fix it if you really wanted to do it, if you were prepared to drop p2p. But still it was a hard descision to make. Why do you think it's like that?
  - gregdoesit 11y ago
    I think it was denial that messaging itself would be more inportant then video calling. Skype got massive because of video (and audio) calls. That was our main differentiator, and what helped us grow. P2P really excelled there. Messaging was built as almost an afterthought and supporting feature, piggybacking on whatever infrastructure we already had in place. And of course it didn't help that there was no one person or team in charge of the user experience who would call out that we have far inferior messaging experience then... any of our competitors, really. Even when we did - and aquired GroupMe to do something about it - we then still had the false sense of security and not needing to hurry, because user numbers were still growing upwards. And when they slowed down, it was too late.

gregdoesit 11y ago

The problem was the avalibity when the sender was offline. You send a message from your iPhone to your friend who has an Android. Your friend doesn't have reception, and after sending the message you kill Skype b/c of the battery drain (otherwise it is being part of the p2p network). Your friend now gets reception and will get your message... between a minute and a couple of hours. Most likely when you turn your phone back on, as the p2p network was not designed to store and propagate offline messages. Meanwhile someone at Whatsapp built a key value pair on a server and if you had reception, you got the messages immediately and reliably. Oh, yeah, because the read and unread message states in Skype also propagated via the p2p network and also got took a while to arrive...

3pt14159 11y ago
I'm really surprised that Skype didn't just build a separate system for mobile. It seems even a simple evaluation of the facts (needing hundreds of engineers to alter an already stable product) pushes things more to the server side than the P2P side.
- 21p 11y ago
  hindsight is 20/20. It would be quite easy for a team of developers and product managers to get together to discuss "how we take what we have and extend it to cover the new use case" rather than "what is the best approach for the new use case".
  - firebones 11y ago
    But even before reuse, the "DNA" point can't be overlooked, though. Success breeds a belief that "our differentiators" need to be considered and baked into subsequent products. More often than not, those constraints lead to situations where you're fitting a square peg into a round hole, as with Skype and P2P messaging. What saves some companies from this is a core DNA that can be interpreted in a very liberal and malleable fashion. For instance, Amazon is about distribution--be it products, bits, computing power. Facebook is about social connection (not P2P or a particular narrowing of tech). Of course, maybe that's just survivorship bias...no one keeps a good directory of the graveyard of corporate DNA that was as similarly broad. Now whether that is a function of articulating flexible DNA, or the flexibility of the decision makers...I don't know. Either way, fixed mindsets close down adaptivity to new opportunities.

pbreit 11y ago

Your is a perfect example of the original posting and the comment you are replying to. People have such a hard time acknowledging what they don't know.