13 ms·

Skype rolls back its redesign by ditching stories and squiggles

150 points by mindgam3 8y ago

mindgam3 8y ago
As much as I love to hate on Skype’s godawful and seemingly inexorable UX decline since the Microsoft acquisition, I have to give them credit for this latest rollback. It takes balls to admit that you were wrong on such a major redesign. No idea what they were smoking when they decided that their target customer was Snapchat users. Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail. This alone has made it my go-to for mission critical video chats. All I could do was cringe in embarrassment when trying to schedule business meetings and seeing those squiggles pop up all over the place. Skype UX doesn’t need to be “fun”. It just needs to be usable. Kudos to the powers that be for making a tough call to benefit their core userbase.
- wvenable 8y ago
  Companies are deathly afraid of introducing new brands and cling to the misguided idea of expanding their existing brand into unrelated territories. Usually this results in the brand losing all meaning. So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory (social media). The technical aspect or what users actually want is a afterthought. Microsoft could release their own alternative to current social media apps but they won't just start small and build a new brand.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    Brands are typically associated with external reputations, but nobody has more exposure to a brand than the employees of the company that owns it. As a result the brand has greater power inside the company than anywhere else - however much a person will say "I'll use this because the name Skype makes me feel good," so much more will Microsoft people say, "I will approve of this because the Skype name makes me feel good."
  - ethbro 8y ago
    > So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory Did someone mention Skype for Business? (... Live 360 ME)
    - cm2187 8y ago
      And given how Microsoft trashed the skype brand, I wonder why they thought it was a good idea to use it for a new product.
      - Jaruzel 8y ago
        Even Skype for Business is now being deprecated, and Teams promoted in its place.
  - orev 8y ago
    See also: Firefox
    - wvenable 8y ago
      https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/evolving-the-firefox-brand/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/evolving-the-firefox-bra... I made a comment about this in a similar vain: Mozilla wants to overload the Firefox name to the point where it's totally meaningless. The success of the Firefox name is no doubt the reason but this fails to recognize that's not how names work. This direction is exactly the reason why Nintendo called their console "WiiU" and that turned out about as well as this ultimately will. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Firefox being the name of a single product. The entire underlying premise of this redesign is flawed.
      - pssflops 8y ago
        What is especially notable about this is that Nintendo recently announced that their Just Dance 2019 game will come out on Wii and NOT the WiiU.
        Dreami 8y ago
        Just for nitpicking, the Wikipedia article says Wii U too (although I know that was a failure, I was just looking for this because it seemed interesting)
        Jonnax 8y ago
        Just dance is made by Ubisoft not Nintendo.
- foobarian 8y ago
  I feel like they have been redesigning way before the MS acquisition. Every year or so there is a new redesign and I can't find any of the buttons.
  - smelendez 8y ago
    They've also deemphasized Skype usernames, which is unfortunate in my most common use case: connecting with someone who requests we use Skype for a one-off international business call. I find I can type, say, jsmith123 into the search box and I'll somehow either get multiple users listed as having that username or a bunch of similarly named accounts, possibly ranked higher than the one I explicitly typed in.
    - csydas 8y ago
      We ran into this as well as our business used Skype for all internal communication for a time, and it was also used for remote interviews, because in the past most people has a Skype username. Now most don't, and Skype pushes that you sign up with your phone number, which is very hard to find, especially if you're linking to someone not from your country. There is no indicator if they used their local number, their number with the country code, their number with some combination of this, and so on. Likewise, it's not as simple as look for their number and add, you need to add them as a contact first then you can message them. It's really unintuitive and contrary to how people use Skype. It's using the method whatsapp, telegram, et.al use, but they don't really have a discoverability feature. You know someone, or you don't until you know someone who does. Skype should either have just ditched the username search or embraced it. They tried to make it both, but they really didn't pull it off well, and now there is an entire subset of the userbase you cannot find with their find feature.
  - ian0 8y ago
    Indeed. As far as I can remember its been a source of pride to have managed to keep an older version and avoided updates. This last one on OSx has been particularly bad though. Its just so slow at doing even basic tasks like chatting.
- mjrbrennan 8y ago
  Have you tried out Zoom? Hands down best video chat / streaming service I've ever used, we used at at work for our fully remote team communication with no issue. High quality and barely ever any lag
  - buffalo2391 8y ago
    I'm very hesitant about zoom. I use it for conference calling at my job and download the app when I had to listen in to a meeting I was off site for. The meeting ended I exited the call and thought nothing of it, then an hour or two later I got an access notification that zoom had opened my camera, while I was under the impression it had quit. Their technique of downloading an executable every time you open a meeting from the web is also strange and somewhat uncomfortable. I do agree that it works brilliantly but I have my concerns about privacy and safety regarding it.
    - acct1771 8y ago
      > Their technique of downloading an executable every time you open a meeting from the web is also strange and somewhat uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, yes. Strange, no. Very common for "enterprise" conference services to do this.
- cm2187 8y ago
  On the decline of skype since the Microsoft acquisition in 2011, there is a metric to observe it: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=skype https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
  - krn 8y ago
    Wow, this is pretty impressive. But where did these people go? Messenger didn't offer video calling until 2015, Whatsapp until 2016.
    - wccrawford 8y ago
      I simply quit using it. I didn't replace it with anything else. Maybe a lot were like me, and simply didn't care enough to keep using it.
    - Lazeb 8y ago
      Apple users stuck to facetime which probably broke up whatever contacts that people had through skype. As an android user I just slowly stopped using skype in favour of discord, except when required for job interviews.
  - abrowne 8y ago
    That's for US searches, and it always seemed that Skype was more popular in Europe, but the graph is very similar if you change it to worldwide searches.
- jorvi 8y ago
  > Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail. Wait what? I have, at least for personal communications, the exact opposite experience. Skype video often cuts out and pauses, or even entirely drops the connection, at which point me and my friend(s) either switch over to FaceTime (if they have iDevices as well, since its by far the most reliable in my experience) or WhatsApp video (decently reliable and pretty much everyone has it).
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I also share the same positive experience about Skype versus alternatives.
- hjek 8y ago
  > Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. I think it's important to include at least one free video chat app when doing a comparison. Have you tried Jitsi Meet[0]? [0]: https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/
  - dbbk 8y ago
    Skype, Hangouts, FaceTime and Slack are all free...?
    - fyolnish 8y ago
      As in beer.
      - hjek 8y ago
        Exactly. Ok, free/libre then if you insist. A link just to make sure: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
k__ 8y ago
Yes, the last overhaul was really bad. Good to see them pivot :)
NullPrefix 8y ago
Onr can hope that they will roll back the electron app. Legacy native app was way faster and this just feels like a downgrade.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  At least the old one still works. I have still have the DMG on my computer just in case it decides to auto-install the new one so I can go back.
PerfectElement 8y ago
A few weeks ago I got a new laptop and downloaded a new version of Skype. It forced me to use a Microsoft account and I could not use my existing Skype name, which had all my contacts. There was no apparent way to move my contacts. I don't care that much about UI changes, but preventing me from using the account that I have been using for 10+ years is ridiculous.
- gumby 8y ago
  Was this on the Mac because I didn't have this issue and I just got a new Mac in August. Just FWIW -- these days a lot of software is inconsistent.
- TremendousJudge 8y ago
  I installed Windows 10 on my machine a couple of weeks ago, and downloaded the latest version of Skype. I could still log in with my 10 year old account, but I couldn't recover my chat history (even though I have the actual appdata dir that contains the chat data)
  - wila 8y ago
    That's because the electron app doesn't use the same files for your chat history. You have to use Skype Classic for that. You can still install the latest 7.41.0.101 version of the classic Skype on a Windows 7 or newer system using one of these links: https://go.skype.com/classic.skype https://go.skype.com/classic.skype http://download.skype.com/msi/SkypeSetup_7.41.0.101.msi http://download.skype.com/msi/SkypeSetup_7.41.0.101.msi https://download.skype.com/5d7ac191986ccb485223c4e4e9e3e4ce/SkypeSetupFull.exe https://download.skype.com/5d7ac191986ccb485223c4e4e9e3e4ce/...
    - TremendousJudge 8y ago
      thank you so much, this is exactly what I wanted
- ungruntled 8y ago
  On the general Microsoft account issue, my Skype account I had for 10+ years also became inaccessable after a random criminal linked their Microsoft account to my Skype account to make fraudulent transactions. After trying to get my skype account back using the account recovery form, I realized that even though I should have had enough answers to successfully recover the account that it was failing probably because all the answers were now being checked against the criminal’s Microsoft account instead of my Skype account. No amount of customer support chatting or Microsoft supoort calling could get that account back, or even get someone to investigate the fraud. I suppose that Skype makes money off these transactions so why bother to stop it.
nerdponx 8y ago
The company had argued at the time that the rise of stories across social media meant it was something that all social apps would adopt. And because it was the way people were used to interacting now, Skype needed to include the feature in its own app, too. When has this type of thinking ever been a good idea?
- jmspring 8y ago
  The PMs in charge of this particular design choice did not listen to external or internal feedback. That is a mistake regardless of the product, space, etc.
  - aplummer 8y ago
    Sometimes it is external feedback, but bad researchers. Customer testing: “what feature you do use every day” “Stories.” We should put stories in.
    - jmspring 8y ago
      The blow back on this change was so bad the ratings in the iOS App Store tanked to 1 Star. It crept back up over time. Early testing indicated people were not happy. The people involved made their impact, got their promos and moved on. When Skype was acquired by Microsoft, it was flooded with PMs (primarily) and devs rolled in. I think LinkedIn has done a better job shielding itself from such. I’m glad to see the rollback, but from talking to friends and family, a lot of damage has been done - mainly around rolling out new design above all else despite degradation in features and quality.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jehlakj 8y ago
    Some teams are structured in a way that there's rarely any time or resources to do user research/testing. I wouldn't necessarily point my finger at the PM's.
buboard 8y ago
you can still use the previous versions on desktop , which threaten you every single time that they 'll be deprecated. Today i feel vindicated though.
dbg31415 8y ago
Glad they rolled back the redesign. Hopefully they will work to improve "Skype for Business" to work more like Skype. Skype for Business is just horrible. 1) Messages appear grouped by who I send them to, but there are multiple message threads. This wouldn't be the end of the world, except if I respond on my phone or laptop the responses go to different message threads. Impossible to read back a message thread and have it make any sense. 2) Most of the time, there's a sync issue... I get messages on all devices, but if I reply I only see my responses on the device that I was on when I typed the response. Mix with point 1, and I have no meaningful history being logged. 3) Messages take different amounts of time to get to a phone or a computer. 4) Files will silently fail to send. I look at a conversation, and it looks like my file goes through... then I look back a day or so later and it says, "File failed to send." So aggravating. Can't rely on it at all. Anyway I know it's probably more to do with the instance my work set up, but this is my first time using Skype for Business since it rebranded away from Lync. And the experience hasn't been good. Give me Slack or Discord or WhatsApp... really anything else. No shortage of options these days.
- user5994461 8y ago
  The 4th point is the file sharing was disabled by the administrator. There really should be a clear message on that rather than error the file transfer. For the rest, I don't think that skype can work at all when opened on multiple devices. It should be easy enough to uninstall from your phone.
- Fellshard 8y ago
  It's just Exchange models extended beyond the breaking point to try and support real-time chat, and it really, really shows. Any time we enter a client that still uses 'Skype for Business', you know you're in for a rough time.
iamleppert 8y ago
Skype is terrible. The call quality sucks, it's overpriced, video calling sucks, screen sharing sucks, and recently text messaging stop working almost completely. So what did they do? They moved the ability to text to some arcane sub-menu, it's still there, albeit non-functional. That was the last straw for me before my account got the axe.
- xevb3k 8y ago
  What’s a good alternative, that has native apps for Mac/Windows/iOS/Android, and isn’t attached to a social network? (Ideally with the ability of callout, buy a phone number etc)
  - savanaly 8y ago
    Slack/discord.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      > native
      - Rjevski 8y ago
        FYI, Skype is no longer native either. They killed off beautiful native clients and replaced them with Electron shit.
        saagarjha 8y ago
        I'm still using the native client, which really isn't all that bad. But the new one is horrendous.
        stephenr 8y ago
        The native (they called it "Classic" on the download page) is no longer available for download. I found this out the hard way.
ilamont 8y ago
Does this happen very often? A UX rollback for a piece of consumer/business software used by hundreds of millions of people?
reassembled 8y ago
We've tried several different video conferencing programs within my company to bring in people from two offices about 150mi apart in Cali, as well as a couple of employees working in the mid-west. Nothing has worked as well as Skype but even Skype still seems to have issues with reliability at times, necessitating a reconnect to the call. When we tried Discord for a while the reliability was ok but some folks had struggled with the user interface. Eventually IT rolled out Office365 but Teams was so unreliable for most people in my group that we stopped using it for our daily stand-up meetings and switched back to Skype. Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference)
- brown9-2 8y ago
  Google Hangouts is pretty decent, especially if you’re already a Google Apps org and you can outfit each conference room with a camera and Chromebox.
- maneesh 8y ago
  Zoom is the best software in the world for this.
  - epistasis 8y ago
    Zoom used to be rock solid, but is also suffering software rot these days. We've been having huge problems with recent updates only being able to talk to some meeting IDs.
  - deathanatos 8y ago
    (I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.) Zoom, 1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.) 2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)
jczhang 8y ago
Can someone explain to me how, with modern day A/B testing, companies can still fail with these kinds of deployments?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- newsbinator 8y ago
  I dunno. When a Skype voice call on my iPhone ends, I look at the screen, and press the sole red button at the bottom-right of the screen. It's a heart, and it attempts and fails to "like" the voice call. Then I press in the middle of the screen and the sole red button becomes a "disconnect call" button. How does that get through A/B testing? How does that get through, "hey Aunt Linda, try to make a call." testing?
- kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
  You assign the A-team to work on other products while the B-teamers work on Skype and create their own unholy mess.
__david__ 8y ago
I just want to be able to resize the computer app to a non-phone sized window (and not all the way to full screen).
rb808 8y ago
Would be nice if they could consolidate Skype, Skype Desktop and Skype for Business (comes with office) that were all installed on my Fathers PC for some reason.
- jetrink 8y ago
  From trying to hold remote meetings in Skype, I've learned that the number of versions of Skype that a colleague has installed is inversely proportional to the their technical ability. Usually it's easier to get someone to install Skype on their smartphone and call in that way than to sort out the confusion on their computer.
m3kw9 8y ago
It’s just a lot of social network fatigue when every freaking app is copying each other with similar features.
gnicholas 8y ago
Now if only they would make Skype For Business comprehensible...I have tried many times to join (not host) a call run by someone at MS or one of their partners, and the links just end up taking me in circles. The host always said it happens regularly, and we just end up talking on the phone.
iliaznk 8y ago
I mostly have to use Skype at work, and only today I've been unexpectedly amazed at how quickly, almost instantly, it starts up on Mac. Great job.
cm2187 8y ago
The article is full of screenshots with skype in full screen mode. But is anyone using skype that way? I want it on the side, not taking real estate space when nothing is happening. Instead they created a big block where you cannot hide the conversation even when there is none. I guess Microsoft must think that their users want to stare at a stale, old conversation and that when they use their computers they should focus on nothing else than skype (and full screen dialog messages notifying them that windows needs to be updated).
- mrweasel 8y ago
  It's not just Microsoft, every company seems to believe that their application needs to be fullscreen, all the time. I reality I don't think that anyone run any app in fullscreen, except perhaps video editors or photoshop. iTunes, Spotify, browsers, editors, everything is shown in fullscreen, and often designed like that. It's doesn't make sense on 27" screen, and it doesn't make sense on an 13", but everyone seems to think that their product is why people have computers, nobody want's to be just a service. Maybe it's a little like CPU, disk or RAM. We have more of it, so applications use it, while not giving us more actual functionality. The old ICQ, MSN and WinAmp got it right. Take up as little screen as possible and just sit in the background and do their thing.
  - oblio 8y ago
    Skype I don't use full screen. But everything else is full screen: browsers, editors, 7-zip, etc. Stacking windows makes them easier to manage, especially on Windows. You just Alt-Tab and it's predictable where the next one will pop up. 90% of the people I've seen, especially regular people, use full screen windows.
alluro2 8y ago
Skype in general was, for me, always one of the "how the hell can they be so successful and so crappy at the same time" experiences. Calls are ok (not more than that), but everything else - UI, resource utilization, pricing, and especially messaging - is just horrible. Messages are so unreliable and inconsistent that they can only be used for something where you don't care that much if it's ever going to be received - which is, I'd assume, not that often. I had a message from my colleague - sitting next to me every day and having Skype open every day same as me - arriving suddenly 6 days after he sent it. And dozens of minutes of delay is just normal. I mean everyone had instant messaging figured out long before Skype - ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN...It's just inexcusable.
- cm2187 8y ago
  ... and if even Yahoo can get it right!
- colordrops 8y ago
  Just goes to show how long a ghost can live inside a famous brand. Skype gained a lot of good will when it first came out and was by far the best thing out there. That hasn't been the case now for at least 10 years and they have living off of that name recognition for a long time.
- donkeyd 8y ago
  I remember the first time I used Skype. I think this wasn't too long after the release in '03. Me and my friend called his dad, who was in Canada, from the Netherlands. We could see him and there was hardly a delay, we were super excited and hadn't experienced anything like this before. For a long time, this experience was tied to the Skype brand. Then FaceTime was released and I could video call my friend in Haiti in high quality without installing new applications, so that's totally replaced Skype for me.
arnon 8y ago
I actually liked the squiggles. Also, once you've tried Whatsapp calls, Viber calls, Google calls... Skype is so much better.
ensiferum 8y ago
Skype is one of those applications that peaked about ~5years ago. It's been getting worse and worse every in single update since then. (and I mean the UI and the UX, perhaps the voice engine is better but that's not visible to the users). It's sad. It was so simple and worked well all those years ago.
stephenr 8y ago
Now if they'll just go back to a proper native desktop app, maybe it'll be usable for business.
Already__Taken 8y ago
I only use skype to call 1 person, Before the redesign the first call would never answer, only ring out. The second call worked. A third+ call always has a periodic echo every 8ish seconds. After the redesign every call now connect pretty fast, but there is no audio or camera for 60 seconds. Every Call & the echo remains. Piece of shit.

150 points by mindgam3 8y ago

As much as I love to hate on Skype’s godawful and seemingly inexorable UX decline since the Microsoft acquisition, I have to give them credit for this latest rollback. It takes balls to admit that you were wrong on such a major redesign. No idea what they were smoking when they decided that their target customer was Snapchat users. Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail. This alone has made it my go-to for mission critical video chats. All I could do was cringe in embarrassment when trying to schedule business meetings and seeing those squiggles pop up all over the place. Skype UX doesn’t need to be “fun”. It just needs to be usable. Kudos to the powers that be for making a tough call to benefit their core userbase.

wvenable 8y ago
Companies are deathly afraid of introducing new brands and cling to the misguided idea of expanding their existing brand into unrelated territories. Usually this results in the brand losing all meaning. So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory (social media). The technical aspect or what users actually want is a afterthought. Microsoft could release their own alternative to current social media apps but they won't just start small and build a new brand.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  Brands are typically associated with external reputations, but nobody has more exposure to a brand than the employees of the company that owns it. As a result the brand has greater power inside the company than anywhere else - however much a person will say "I'll use this because the name Skype makes me feel good," so much more will Microsoft people say, "I will approve of this because the Skype name makes me feel good."
- ethbro 8y ago
  > So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory Did someone mention Skype for Business? (... Live 360 ME)
  - cm2187 8y ago
    And given how Microsoft trashed the skype brand, I wonder why they thought it was a good idea to use it for a new product.
    - Jaruzel 8y ago
      Even Skype for Business is now being deprecated, and Teams promoted in its place.
- orev 8y ago
  See also: Firefox
  - wvenable 8y ago
    https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/evolving-the-firefox-brand/ https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/evolving-the-firefox-bra... I made a comment about this in a similar vain: Mozilla wants to overload the Firefox name to the point where it's totally meaningless. The success of the Firefox name is no doubt the reason but this fails to recognize that's not how names work. This direction is exactly the reason why Nintendo called their console "WiiU" and that turned out about as well as this ultimately will. There is absolutely nothing wrong with Firefox being the name of a single product. The entire underlying premise of this redesign is flawed.
    - pssflops 8y ago
      What is especially notable about this is that Nintendo recently announced that their Just Dance 2019 game will come out on Wii and NOT the WiiU.
      - Dreami 8y ago
        Just for nitpicking, the Wikipedia article says Wii U too (although I know that was a failure, I was just looking for this because it seemed interesting)
      - Jonnax 8y ago
        Just dance is made by Ubisoft not Nintendo.
foobarian 8y ago
I feel like they have been redesigning way before the MS acquisition. Every year or so there is a new redesign and I can't find any of the buttons.
- smelendez 8y ago
  They've also deemphasized Skype usernames, which is unfortunate in my most common use case: connecting with someone who requests we use Skype for a one-off international business call. I find I can type, say, jsmith123 into the search box and I'll somehow either get multiple users listed as having that username or a bunch of similarly named accounts, possibly ranked higher than the one I explicitly typed in.
  - csydas 8y ago
    We ran into this as well as our business used Skype for all internal communication for a time, and it was also used for remote interviews, because in the past most people has a Skype username. Now most don't, and Skype pushes that you sign up with your phone number, which is very hard to find, especially if you're linking to someone not from your country. There is no indicator if they used their local number, their number with the country code, their number with some combination of this, and so on. Likewise, it's not as simple as look for their number and add, you need to add them as a contact first then you can message them. It's really unintuitive and contrary to how people use Skype. It's using the method whatsapp, telegram, et.al use, but they don't really have a discoverability feature. You know someone, or you don't until you know someone who does. Skype should either have just ditched the username search or embraced it. They tried to make it both, but they really didn't pull it off well, and now there is an entire subset of the userbase you cannot find with their find feature.
- ian0 8y ago
  Indeed. As far as I can remember its been a source of pride to have managed to keep an older version and avoided updates. This last one on OSx has been particularly bad though. Its just so slow at doing even basic tasks like chatting.
mjrbrennan 8y ago
Have you tried out Zoom? Hands down best video chat / streaming service I've ever used, we used at at work for our fully remote team communication with no issue. High quality and barely ever any lag
- buffalo2391 8y ago
  I'm very hesitant about zoom. I use it for conference calling at my job and download the app when I had to listen in to a meeting I was off site for. The meeting ended I exited the call and thought nothing of it, then an hour or two later I got an access notification that zoom had opened my camera, while I was under the impression it had quit. Their technique of downloading an executable every time you open a meeting from the web is also strange and somewhat uncomfortable. I do agree that it works brilliantly but I have my concerns about privacy and safety regarding it.
  - acct1771 8y ago
    > Their technique of downloading an executable every time you open a meeting from the web is also strange and somewhat uncomfortable. Uncomfortable, yes. Strange, no. Very common for "enterprise" conference services to do this.
cm2187 8y ago
On the decline of skype since the Microsoft acquisition in 2011, there is a metric to observe it: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=skype https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
- krn 8y ago
  Wow, this is pretty impressive. But where did these people go? Messenger didn't offer video calling until 2015, Whatsapp until 2016.
  - wccrawford 8y ago
    I simply quit using it. I didn't replace it with anything else. Maybe a lot were like me, and simply didn't care enough to keep using it.
  - Lazeb 8y ago
    Apple users stuck to facetime which probably broke up whatever contacts that people had through skype. As an android user I just slowly stopped using skype in favour of discord, except when required for job interviews.
- abrowne 8y ago
  That's for US searches, and it always seemed that Skype was more popular in Europe, but the graph is very similar if you change it to worldwide searches.
jorvi 8y ago
> Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail. Wait what? I have, at least for personal communications, the exact opposite experience. Skype video often cuts out and pauses, or even entirely drops the connection, at which point me and my friend(s) either switch over to FaceTime (if they have iDevices as well, since its by far the most reliable in my experience) or WhatsApp video (decently reliable and pretty much everyone has it).
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I also share the same positive experience about Skype versus alternatives.
hjek 8y ago
> Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. I think it's important to include at least one free video chat app when doing a comparison. Have you tried Jitsi Meet[0]? [0]: https://meet.jit.si/ https://meet.jit.si/
- dbbk 8y ago
  Skype, Hangouts, FaceTime and Slack are all free...?
  - fyolnish 8y ago
    As in beer.
    - hjek 8y ago
      Exactly. Ok, free/libre then if you insist. A link just to make sure: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

k__ 8y ago

Yes, the last overhaul was really bad. Good to see them pivot :)

NullPrefix 8y ago

Onr can hope that they will roll back the electron app. Legacy native app was way faster and this just feels like a downgrade.

saagarjha 8y ago
At least the old one still works. I have still have the DMG on my computer just in case it decides to auto-install the new one so I can go back.

PerfectElement 8y ago

A few weeks ago I got a new laptop and downloaded a new version of Skype. It forced me to use a Microsoft account and I could not use my existing Skype name, which had all my contacts. There was no apparent way to move my contacts. I don't care that much about UI changes, but preventing me from using the account that I have been using for 10+ years is ridiculous.

gumby 8y ago
Was this on the Mac because I didn't have this issue and I just got a new Mac in August. Just FWIW -- these days a lot of software is inconsistent.
TremendousJudge 8y ago
I installed Windows 10 on my machine a couple of weeks ago, and downloaded the latest version of Skype. I could still log in with my 10 year old account, but I couldn't recover my chat history (even though I have the actual appdata dir that contains the chat data)
- wila 8y ago
  That's because the electron app doesn't use the same files for your chat history. You have to use Skype Classic for that. You can still install the latest 7.41.0.101 version of the classic Skype on a Windows 7 or newer system using one of these links: https://go.skype.com/classic.skype https://go.skype.com/classic.skype http://download.skype.com/msi/SkypeSetup_7.41.0.101.msi http://download.skype.com/msi/SkypeSetup_7.41.0.101.msi https://download.skype.com/5d7ac191986ccb485223c4e4e9e3e4ce/SkypeSetupFull.exe https://download.skype.com/5d7ac191986ccb485223c4e4e9e3e4ce/...
  - TremendousJudge 8y ago
    thank you so much, this is exactly what I wanted
ungruntled 8y ago
On the general Microsoft account issue, my Skype account I had for 10+ years also became inaccessable after a random criminal linked their Microsoft account to my Skype account to make fraudulent transactions. After trying to get my skype account back using the account recovery form, I realized that even though I should have had enough answers to successfully recover the account that it was failing probably because all the answers were now being checked against the criminal’s Microsoft account instead of my Skype account. No amount of customer support chatting or Microsoft supoort calling could get that account back, or even get someone to investigate the fraud. I suppose that Skype makes money off these transactions so why bother to stop it.

nerdponx 8y ago

The company had argued at the time that the rise of stories across social media meant it was something that all social apps would adopt. And because it was the way people were used to interacting now, Skype needed to include the feature in its own app, too. When has this type of thinking ever been a good idea?

jmspring 8y ago
The PMs in charge of this particular design choice did not listen to external or internal feedback. That is a mistake regardless of the product, space, etc.
- aplummer 8y ago
  Sometimes it is external feedback, but bad researchers. Customer testing: “what feature you do use every day” “Stories.” We should put stories in.
  - jmspring 8y ago
    The blow back on this change was so bad the ratings in the iOS App Store tanked to 1 Star. It crept back up over time. Early testing indicated people were not happy. The people involved made their impact, got their promos and moved on. When Skype was acquired by Microsoft, it was flooded with PMs (primarily) and devs rolled in. I think LinkedIn has done a better job shielding itself from such. I’m glad to see the rollback, but from talking to friends and family, a lot of damage has been done - mainly around rolling out new design above all else despite degradation in features and quality.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jehlakj 8y ago
  Some teams are structured in a way that there's rarely any time or resources to do user research/testing. I wouldn't necessarily point my finger at the PM's.

buboard 8y ago

you can still use the previous versions on desktop , which threaten you every single time that they 'll be deprecated. Today i feel vindicated though.

dbg31415 8y ago

Glad they rolled back the redesign. Hopefully they will work to improve "Skype for Business" to work more like Skype. Skype for Business is just horrible. 1) Messages appear grouped by who I send them to, but there are multiple message threads. This wouldn't be the end of the world, except if I respond on my phone or laptop the responses go to different message threads. Impossible to read back a message thread and have it make any sense. 2) Most of the time, there's a sync issue... I get messages on all devices, but if I reply I only see my responses on the device that I was on when I typed the response. Mix with point 1, and I have no meaningful history being logged. 3) Messages take different amounts of time to get to a phone or a computer. 4) Files will silently fail to send. I look at a conversation, and it looks like my file goes through... then I look back a day or so later and it says, "File failed to send." So aggravating. Can't rely on it at all. Anyway I know it's probably more to do with the instance my work set up, but this is my first time using Skype for Business since it rebranded away from Lync. And the experience hasn't been good. Give me Slack or Discord or WhatsApp... really anything else. No shortage of options these days.

user5994461 8y ago
The 4th point is the file sharing was disabled by the administrator. There really should be a clear message on that rather than error the file transfer. For the rest, I don't think that skype can work at all when opened on multiple devices. It should be easy enough to uninstall from your phone.
Fellshard 8y ago
It's just Exchange models extended beyond the breaking point to try and support real-time chat, and it really, really shows. Any time we enter a client that still uses 'Skype for Business', you know you're in for a rough time.

iamleppert 8y ago

Skype is terrible. The call quality sucks, it's overpriced, video calling sucks, screen sharing sucks, and recently text messaging stop working almost completely. So what did they do? They moved the ability to text to some arcane sub-menu, it's still there, albeit non-functional. That was the last straw for me before my account got the axe.

xevb3k 8y ago
What’s a good alternative, that has native apps for Mac/Windows/iOS/Android, and isn’t attached to a social network? (Ideally with the ability of callout, buy a phone number etc)
- savanaly 8y ago
  Slack/discord.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    > native
    - Rjevski 8y ago
      FYI, Skype is no longer native either. They killed off beautiful native clients and replaced them with Electron shit.
      - saagarjha 8y ago
        I'm still using the native client, which really isn't all that bad. But the new one is horrendous.
        stephenr 8y ago
        The native (they called it "Classic" on the download page) is no longer available for download. I found this out the hard way.

ilamont 8y ago

Does this happen very often? A UX rollback for a piece of consumer/business software used by hundreds of millions of people?

reassembled 8y ago

We've tried several different video conferencing programs within my company to bring in people from two offices about 150mi apart in Cali, as well as a couple of employees working in the mid-west. Nothing has worked as well as Skype but even Skype still seems to have issues with reliability at times, necessitating a reconnect to the call. When we tried Discord for a while the reliability was ok but some folks had struggled with the user interface. Eventually IT rolled out Office365 but Teams was so unreliable for most people in my group that we stopped using it for our daily stand-up meetings and switched back to Skype. Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference)

brown9-2 8y ago
Google Hangouts is pretty decent, especially if you’re already a Google Apps org and you can outfit each conference room with a camera and Chromebox.
maneesh 8y ago
Zoom is the best software in the world for this.
- epistasis 8y ago
  Zoom used to be rock solid, but is also suffering software rot these days. We've been having huge problems with recent updates only being able to talk to some meeting IDs.
- deathanatos 8y ago
  (I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.) Zoom, 1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.) 2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)

jczhang 8y ago

Can someone explain to me how, with modern day A/B testing, companies can still fail with these kinds of deployments?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
newsbinator 8y ago
I dunno. When a Skype voice call on my iPhone ends, I look at the screen, and press the sole red button at the bottom-right of the screen. It's a heart, and it attempts and fails to "like" the voice call. Then I press in the middle of the screen and the sole red button becomes a "disconnect call" button. How does that get through A/B testing? How does that get through, "hey Aunt Linda, try to make a call." testing?
kevin_thibedeau 8y ago
You assign the A-team to work on other products while the B-teamers work on Skype and create their own unholy mess.

__david__ 8y ago

I just want to be able to resize the computer app to a non-phone sized window (and not all the way to full screen).

rb808 8y ago

Would be nice if they could consolidate Skype, Skype Desktop and Skype for Business (comes with office) that were all installed on my Fathers PC for some reason.

jetrink 8y ago
From trying to hold remote meetings in Skype, I've learned that the number of versions of Skype that a colleague has installed is inversely proportional to the their technical ability. Usually it's easier to get someone to install Skype on their smartphone and call in that way than to sort out the confusion on their computer.

m3kw9 8y ago

It’s just a lot of social network fatigue when every freaking app is copying each other with similar features.

gnicholas 8y ago

Now if only they would make Skype For Business comprehensible...I have tried many times to join (not host) a call run by someone at MS or one of their partners, and the links just end up taking me in circles. The host always said it happens regularly, and we just end up talking on the phone.

iliaznk 8y ago

I mostly have to use Skype at work, and only today I've been unexpectedly amazed at how quickly, almost instantly, it starts up on Mac. Great job.

cm2187 8y ago

The article is full of screenshots with skype in full screen mode. But is anyone using skype that way? I want it on the side, not taking real estate space when nothing is happening. Instead they created a big block where you cannot hide the conversation even when there is none. I guess Microsoft must think that their users want to stare at a stale, old conversation and that when they use their computers they should focus on nothing else than skype (and full screen dialog messages notifying them that windows needs to be updated).

mrweasel 8y ago
It's not just Microsoft, every company seems to believe that their application needs to be fullscreen, all the time. I reality I don't think that anyone run any app in fullscreen, except perhaps video editors or photoshop. iTunes, Spotify, browsers, editors, everything is shown in fullscreen, and often designed like that. It's doesn't make sense on 27" screen, and it doesn't make sense on an 13", but everyone seems to think that their product is why people have computers, nobody want's to be just a service. Maybe it's a little like CPU, disk or RAM. We have more of it, so applications use it, while not giving us more actual functionality. The old ICQ, MSN and WinAmp got it right. Take up as little screen as possible and just sit in the background and do their thing.
- oblio 8y ago
  Skype I don't use full screen. But everything else is full screen: browsers, editors, 7-zip, etc. Stacking windows makes them easier to manage, especially on Windows. You just Alt-Tab and it's predictable where the next one will pop up. 90% of the people I've seen, especially regular people, use full screen windows.

alluro2 8y ago

Skype in general was, for me, always one of the "how the hell can they be so successful and so crappy at the same time" experiences. Calls are ok (not more than that), but everything else - UI, resource utilization, pricing, and especially messaging - is just horrible. Messages are so unreliable and inconsistent that they can only be used for something where you don't care that much if it's ever going to be received - which is, I'd assume, not that often. I had a message from my colleague - sitting next to me every day and having Skype open every day same as me - arriving suddenly 6 days after he sent it. And dozens of minutes of delay is just normal. I mean everyone had instant messaging figured out long before Skype - ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN...It's just inexcusable.

cm2187 8y ago
... and if even Yahoo can get it right!
colordrops 8y ago
Just goes to show how long a ghost can live inside a famous brand. Skype gained a lot of good will when it first came out and was by far the best thing out there. That hasn't been the case now for at least 10 years and they have living off of that name recognition for a long time.
donkeyd 8y ago
I remember the first time I used Skype. I think this wasn't too long after the release in '03. Me and my friend called his dad, who was in Canada, from the Netherlands. We could see him and there was hardly a delay, we were super excited and hadn't experienced anything like this before. For a long time, this experience was tied to the Skype brand. Then FaceTime was released and I could video call my friend in Haiti in high quality without installing new applications, so that's totally replaced Skype for me.

arnon 8y ago

I actually liked the squiggles. Also, once you've tried Whatsapp calls, Viber calls, Google calls... Skype is so much better.

ensiferum 8y ago

Skype is one of those applications that peaked about ~5years ago. It's been getting worse and worse every in single update since then. (and I mean the UI and the UX, perhaps the voice engine is better but that's not visible to the users). It's sad. It was so simple and worked well all those years ago.

stephenr 8y ago

Now if they'll just go back to a proper native desktop app, maybe it'll be usable for business.

Already__Taken 8y ago

I only use skype to call 1 person, Before the redesign the first call would never answer, only ring out. The second call worked. A third+ call always has a periodic echo every 8ish seconds. After the redesign every call now connect pretty fast, but there is no audio or camera for 60 seconds. Every Call & the echo remains. Piece of shit.