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"Since acquiring Skype from private equity investors, Microsoft has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market, a change that has made Skype l

• cm2187 8y ago
  Agree. It reminds me of Microsoft's defense of Windows 8, "people are just struggling to adjust to something that's new". Whereas internally they were aware that their UX sucked, the OEM all told them the UX sucked, and they fired the head of the Windows division.
  • nikanj 8y ago
    Firing the head of the Windows division came late in the game. From what I’ve heard, critizing the UX was a great way to ruin your annual performance reviews (and get fired).
    • cm2187 8y ago
      It's going to be hard to find the exact episode but I remember an episode of dotnetrocks where Carl & Richard (who are reasonably close to Microsoft and aren't really anti-msft) mentioned that when Sinofsky walked up the stage to announced Windows 8 he had already been told he would be asked to go.
  • slededit 8y ago
    I was there at the time (on an app team) The people behind the new UI really thought it was right and everyone else just hadn't got it yet.
• _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  > Modus operandi in most Skype conference calls in our company is to spend the first 4-5 minutes in handshaking ("can you hear me") and troubleshooting problems. But of course doing this in no way guarantees lack of problems later. Almost every time I use Skype at some point in the middle of the call one caller is suddenly unable to hear the other.
• std_throwaway 8y ago
  I don't understand how software can get this much worse. Having done absolutely nothing would have left Skype in a better shape than what we have now. What did they do with it? Do they not regression test? Are they letting each new intern add a new feature while nobody really cares about quality? Did they just replace the old software with a new bug-riddled software that's getting pushed out the door without quality checks? Is it some manager trying to earn a medal by using that new MS-framework to rebuild everything and needing to push it out fast to declare success and move up while leaving the ruins behind?
  • kuschku 8y ago
    They switched from P2P to a hosted model because suddenly CGNATs showed up everywhere on the internet with no way through them.
    • std_throwaway 8y ago
      Wouldn't a central proxy service as fallback be enough then?
      • hedora 8y ago
        They used to do this. Now, WebRTC supports it in a standardized way, which has created a long list of competing services. :-)
    • jacquesm 8y ago
      Skype was excellent at traversing all kinds of firewalls, in fact that made them the market leader.
      • wetpaws 8y ago
        This. You could spend days setting up port forwarding and tunneling for some game, but you could always be sure Skype will find some loophole and just work out of the box.
• chatmasta 8y ago
  Lol, I had an issue like this Skyping with one person in particular. For some reason, after exactly 5 minutes and 10 seconds, the call dropped. Every single time we called each other. I use google meet now and it’s way better.
  • jccooper 8y ago
    I had a call that (asymmetrically) crashed every 15min. I eventually figured out that was when they rotated the ads.
• erikb 8y ago
  Yes, but why do you think that this is not related? I'd say call quality and usability of a call service are strongly related.
• jacquesm 8y ago
  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.
  • bigdubs 8y ago
    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.
    • tytytytytytytyt 8y ago
      Then why did quality drop so much?
      • hedora 8y ago
        I find the CADT development model is surprisingly good at explaining most software engineering trainwrecks these days: https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
        • deleted 8y ago
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        • jacquesm 8y ago
          For the uninitiated: linking from HN to JWZ's blog has a slightly different effect than what you expect.
          • sah2ed 8y ago
            The effect works by showing a NSFW image if the referer is detected to be HN. To avoid the effect, you need to open links to jwz.org in a private window.
• kalleboo 8y ago
  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.
• city41 8y ago
  To be fair, we do that same “handshake” with google hangouts.
• ropeadopepope 8y ago
  > the call quality is horrendous and dropping calls in the middle of the meeting is quite common. And yet, it's better than everything else I've tried. My team uses slack screen share every day and nearly every day we need to switch to skype for other team members to see the screen share.
  • jenscow 8y ago
    You compare it to slack, of all things?
    • ropeadopepope 8y ago
      What am I supposed to be comparing it to? Something I don't use on a daily basis?
      • jenscow 8y ago
        Sorry, it was a dig at slack - not you.
      • kwindla 8y ago
        We'd really love for you to try our startup's WebRTC calls + screen-sharing + dial-in application. Free video calls and telephone dial-in. We work really hard on call quality, reliability, and UX, building on top of the (increasingly good) core WebRTC spec/implementation available in Chrome. (And other browsers are coming along, too.) https://www.daily.co/ https://www.daily.co/ We hugely value feedback about quality and reliability, especially from folks who have issues with everything else they've tried.
• ino 8y ago
  Desktop skype has also enabled a sound volume limiter or background filter that's awful and for that reason alone we still use an older skype version.
• brixon 8y ago
  "Skype for Business" is not Skype, it is a re-brand of the Messenger tool they already had. It is super obvious once you start dealing with the API.
• jordache 8y ago
  If that's the nail in the coffin then why is skype still popular? The voice/video/screen share performance is consistently always bad, to the level of unusable.
  • ItsMe000001 8y ago
    Same reason people are on LinkedIn, FB, etc. I don't switch because all the people in my call list are on Skype. Also, I don't have any smartphone, only PC and laptop, so I don't even know or care what kind of apps for iOS or Android there are. ON teh PC I have to use "Skype Classic", which MS would like to get rid of (default download is the app for Windows 10). That app is unusable, and I'm tempted to add "literally" for emphasis but I'll wait until this new meaning of this word is (even) more established and the original one more forgotten :-) For example, in the app I can't even control my online status unless I keep the app open, while old Desktop-Skype lets me choose the status and I can close the window but the service remains available through the taskbar icon. I'm also unable to see a list of my contacts filtered by who is online in the app, which I consider to be as basic as it gets.
    • jamie_ca 8y ago
      I was gently ribbing my friends about their woes and complaints with Skype over the past few years (one in particular had repeated bouts of skype throwing up ads _with audio_) and commenting that my Mac client was just as usable as it's always been. Alas that that's no longer the case, we've moved all our casual chat (and voice, and video, and screenshare) to Discord and haven't looked back.
      • benrbray 8y ago
        I left Skype for Hangouts as soon as they started putting autoplaying ads with audio in my calls. You have to be completely disconnected from the needs of your users to even consider doing such a thing.
    • OnMyPhone 8y ago
      "I'm also unable to see a list of my contacts filtered by who is online in the app, which I consider to be as basic as it gets." It still boggles my mind that someone thought this is a good thing to do. I read on a KB on MS site when I was trying to figure out how to change that, and it said to see if someone is online send them a message first. I'm paraphrasing of course, but I couldn't believe that that was coming from MS about something so simple as trying to figure out who is online.
• zamalek 8y ago
  > Microsoft has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market It's also patently incorrect. Skype for Business (formerly Lync) is a completely different product and protocol than Skype - it is one of the few implementations of SIMPLE[1] (plus proprietary extensions), where Skype proper is completely proprietary. > This is absolutely not the bulk of the problem Agreed, I'm not sure if it is because SIMPLE (which is anything but) was used or because it is coded poorly, but Skype for Business is unusable. Teams supposedly uses the same infrastructure, which is why we still use G2M for conference calls. [1]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6914 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6914
• ams6110 8y ago
  Honestly, at least from my experience, 4-5 minutes is lucky. What I see is more like 15 minutes, regardless of the technology. Skype, Zoom, GoToMeeting, Adobe Connect, it's all confusing and hard to use for non-tech participants who aren't experienced with it.
• MR4D 8y ago
  What is so funny about this, is that they already have a solution for the corporate market - it's called Teams !!! The ability for MSFT to reinvent the wheel is astounding. We use Teams at work, and had installed Skype for about 2 weeks before it got so annoying that we deleted Skype. Now, we're looking to replace Teams with RIOT, once the software gets a little better. By my guess, that will probably be early next year. The impetus to change is driven by the mindless complexity that MSFT products add to the office 365 stack. Every time we add an app, a new group gets created. Now we have so many groups, I am afraid of deleting them, as documents might be attached. I still don't know what all Skype did for the brief two weeks we had it, but it's gone now!
  • deleted 8y ago
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• godzillabrennus 8y ago
  It takes a few minutes to handshake each users connection with the NSA to be recorded. Call quality was better when it was peer to peer and not routed through a Central Intelligence Agency.
• alkonaut 8y ago
  I havent had a sound or conection issue in Skype in many years (10?) despite using it for international calls several times per day, both 1-1 and group, both voice and video. It’s possible that it just isn’t tolerant to intermittent network problems and I just don’t have any. Not sure. It’s horrible in most other ways (autocorrect, emoji, ads, installation, limited group size for screen sharing, ...) but calls are really the one thing that works 100% Edit: I’m talking about Skype proper, not Lync, the product Microsoft later dubbed “Skype for business”.
• petepete 8y ago
  I recently moved to Skype from Hangouts and Skype's call quality is miles better, we've barely had a dropped call (that isn't caused by a cat who likes to sit on the keyboard) and overall I'm incredibly impressed. The only annoying thing is that web.skype.com doesn't work in Firefox.
• hkmurakami 8y ago
  No wonder people are using Discord for corporate calls. And I find it humorous that Discord is imploring people to not use it for corporate stuff.
• noja 8y ago
  > refocused the online calling service on the corporate market HA! As if. I don't know anyone who uses Skype for Business who doesn't hate something about it with a vengeance.
• dboreham 8y ago
  Call quality? How about the fact that _chat_ doesn't work now? How badly do you have to screw up to lose chat messages constantly?
• deleted 8y ago
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• mantas 8y ago
  The new electron-based UI is super shitty too. Thank god I still can use the old native app on the Mac for now.
• mathw 8y ago
  Exactly this. Microsoft took something that worked almost all the time and turned it into a technical nightmare. I've spent hours trying to fix it for myself, both normal Skype and Skype for Business, and for my sister who has been trying to use it to reduce the amount she needs to travel to London for board meetings because they have much better things to do with their non-profit's budget than travel expenses and it's 2018. Turns out in 2018 it's still easier to get on a train and meet up in a stuffy room somewhere than to use Skype or Hangouts to have a meeting.