8 ms·

> I never quite understood why Microsoft is so hell-bent on adding stupid features, removing useful ones and creating unwanted re-designs for Skype instead impr

> I never quite understood why Microsoft is so hell-bent on adding stupid features, removing useful ones and creating unwanted re-designs for Skype instead improving core features. I'm looking forward to a Microsoft insider's exposé on what really happened inside the Skype team to destroy such a beloved product. It was indeed loved in its pre-Microsoft heyday around 2008-2010: I remember an international student telling me that Skype changed her life because she could stay in audio & video contact with her family overseas. Since the Microsoft acquisition, every single aspect of Skype has gotten worse. It's remarkable that if Microsoft had done nothing with Skype other than simply keeping it up-to-date with new releases of Windows, OS X, Linux, etc., it would be a far superior product. As far as I can tell, only two things keep it alive: the tremendous installed base from when it was a much esteemed program and the fact that it runs on everything -- making it the common denominator when the grumpy Windows desktop guy needs to video chat with the hipster on the newest iPad Pro. :-).

8ytecoder 8y ago
Got my parents a Skype camera that plugged into the Sony TV. The best way to stay in touch with them. They didn't even need to know to operate a smartphone. A few years later - the TV app was disabled, Skype on the phone doesn't stay logged in, call drops, the interface is confusing and we have moved on to FaceTime and WhatsApp now. They took a great product and decimated it.
- setquk 8y ago
  To be fair this was probably Sony. I bought one of their smart TVs and they canned the YouTube app on it after six months. Plus it was slow as molasses. I’ve only owned a cheap ass dumb bottom end Samsung TV since and life is better.
  - felipelemos 8y ago
    It was indeed Microsoft. They disabled for all brands. I had the same problem at the time with my Samsung TV. Ref: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/08/skype-is-killing-its-smart-tv-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/08/skype-is-killing-its-smart...
    - setquk 8y ago
      Gah. That's just horrible. There should be a minimum supported period of 6 years for all software on smart TVs, the consequences of which are full refund of the initial purchase price of the TV. That'd kill this shit overnight.
      - alias_neo 8y ago
        I'm inclined to agree, I'm on my second flagship TV in 7 years, the first, A Samsung OLED 3D Smart TV had most of its apps killed within 2-3 years, I'm now on an LG, WebOS so not many apps to start with, but I see this going the same way soon. I'd love to be able to just not have all of the "smart" features that they kill well within the lifespan of the TV and instead offload them to an external box. At least the Samsung didn't have huge Netflix, Amazon etc buttons on the remote, like the LG, which will end up doing nothing some day.
      - CWuestefeld 8y ago
        This is a mega-tangent, but... Frankly, if you're dumb enough to buy a smart TV, this is what you deserve. It should be obvious that (a) the expected lifespan of the hardware investment in a TV is a pretty long time - 10 years, maybe? But (b) the expected lifespan of the "smart" part is obviously much smaller: for example, you know that codecs are going to change, and computational requirements for them will increase significantly (e.g., from MPEG2->DIVX->H264->H265) on a much faster scale, maybe 2-3 years. With the hardware for the display being on drastically different horizon than that for the computation, it should be obvious that the overall product design is flawed. And it's flawed in a way that updated software will eventually be unable to cover. EDIT: obviously we want to be able to do "smart" stuff with our TVs. But the right approach for this is with separate components (e.g., Roku, Fire, Apple TV) that we can swap out as they become obsolete while retaining the longer-term investment in the display.
        setquk 8y ago
        Fair points and totally agree. I was dumb enough (I would use the same words!) to buy one the first time round so I agree with you.
  - jacobush 8y ago
    I have a high end QLED Samsung TV. Horrible, horrible. Audio over HDMI does not work. Had to use optical cable to receiver. Apps hang and have to be reinstalled to recover them, or power yanked at wall socket. It randomly switches from TV or Netflix/Plex app to "HDMI2" or whatever when watching a movie. Doesn't matter if using an external device like an Apple TV - so you can't even treat it like a dumb display, which was my fallback for my previous "Smart" Philips TV. (It only had horribly slow UI, but was stable.) The panel is top notch. QLED to me is a perfect balance between the over-saturated colors of OLED, and the gray blacks of LED. But Samsung and software... it never works. Sync photos from Android phone to PC? Oh, the PC software only does 1000 photos at a time. Then you must delete 1000 photos and start over, rinse repeat. That's 22 times if you are helping a friend backup a few years of photos. Each time I encounter a Samsung device with "smart" anything in it, I think, no it must be OK this time. It can't be that so disparate divisions all produce crappy code, over the more than a decade now I've been following them. But yes. Every. Fucking. Time.
    - alias_neo 8y ago
      This is the reason I went LG this time, my Samsung TV has all of the issues you're describing. The LG is marginally better but it still has issues with audio over ARC and figuring out when to switch on the surround amp and when not to. It'll also randomly switch back to the ARC input if something connected gives it a nudge, while I'm doing something else. I bought high-end in both cases and it really makes you grit your teeth to realise they can't get this right even at the prices you're paying.
craftyguy 8y ago
Gosh, the more recent microsoft acquisitions (e.g. linkedin, github, etc) won't suffer the same fate, right?
- pmlnr 8y ago
  LinkedIn would deserve it though.
  - setquk 8y ago
    I’m not sure you could make LinkedIn worse if you tried.
  - Tor3 8y ago
    I took a final look at Linkedin some weeks ago.. hadn't logged in in ages. Totally useless, never-ending scrolling pages, tried to look like FB I guess. No informational content anywhere. So I deleted my account. Something I've had in mind since MS bought it. The updated layout was the final nail in the coffin. No more Linkedin for me, and definitely nothing to miss.
    - LadyCailin 8y ago
      Eh. Both of my last two jobs were through LinkedIn, so if nothing else, it’s worth it for that. Having said that, the social features are fairly useless, and other than when I’ve been actively searching for jobs, I don’t really use it.
- toper-centage 8y ago
  Linked also suffered the same fate. They pushed it so hard for it to be a mainstream social media for professionals. Problem is that no one wants to use it as such.
  - alanfranzoni 8y ago
    Sort feed by date -> OK. But the setting is not retained. Terrible.
bertil 8y ago
> I'm looking forward to a Microsoft insider's exposé I interviewed there, soon after the acquisition, maybe nine months. Probably one of the most shocking experiences in many aspects: they flew me from Europe, no one was ready to talk to me, or knew I was coming at all. I waited more than an hour, thought about leaving, hoping they wouldn’t mind paying for my hotel room and flight either way. Then someone who I recognised from their LinkedIn photo passed me, I said hi—they were surprised and thought the interview wasn’t happening. I had three interviews from people at most three months out of university (nothing but the same two brain-teasers); overall, the place seemed like completely lacking self-awareness. I had lunch with the only person with any experience, the UX researcher/ethnographer (six months out of post-doc) who was… way over everything. Chosen quotes: “Children running a daycare”, “the entitlement is staggering”, she was happy because that paid way better than academia and she could learn about private research, save money, go to meet-ups and interview. I liked the lunch because I had tried to make my joke during the interview, one about how Skype allows me to get three alerts about the birthday of a recruiter with whom I had an awkward 20-min chat six years ago (wink, wink: I care about users’ experience too). Blank stare from Chad. The UX researcher got it. It wasn’t funny, but at least I felt like I had pushed my bug report at the edge of my ability zone. I didn’t get a call-back. I was stranded for six months on an email chain with the recruitment coordinator who was only able to reimburse me with a paper check in dollars (I had bank accounts in four different currencies at that point but not dollars). I honestly think that I got so tired of it all that I just forgot… Or maybe I ended up cashing it at pennies on the dollar because my bank had pity on me. Anyway, a couple of years later, a new colleague at Facebook joins from there. The guy spent his first three months listing all the terrible, terrible things he saw there. Just new ways of being broken, every day over lunch, for a hundred days. I was impressed. That guy isn’t shy. Not sure he’s a great writer, but there was a lot to be learned there.
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  This is disturbing. Satya, are you there?
  - java-man 8y ago
    He is busy pushing code to overwrite users' font preferences and install multigigabyte updates...

8ytecoder 8y ago

Got my parents a Skype camera that plugged into the Sony TV. The best way to stay in touch with them. They didn't even need to know to operate a smartphone. A few years later - the TV app was disabled, Skype on the phone doesn't stay logged in, call drops, the interface is confusing and we have moved on to FaceTime and WhatsApp now. They took a great product and decimated it.

setquk 8y ago
To be fair this was probably Sony. I bought one of their smart TVs and they canned the YouTube app on it after six months. Plus it was slow as molasses. I’ve only owned a cheap ass dumb bottom end Samsung TV since and life is better.
- felipelemos 8y ago
  It was indeed Microsoft. They disabled for all brands. I had the same problem at the time with my Samsung TV. Ref: https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/08/skype-is-killing-its-smart-tv-app/ https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/08/skype-is-killing-its-smart...
  - setquk 8y ago
    Gah. That's just horrible. There should be a minimum supported period of 6 years for all software on smart TVs, the consequences of which are full refund of the initial purchase price of the TV. That'd kill this shit overnight.
    - alias_neo 8y ago
      I'm inclined to agree, I'm on my second flagship TV in 7 years, the first, A Samsung OLED 3D Smart TV had most of its apps killed within 2-3 years, I'm now on an LG, WebOS so not many apps to start with, but I see this going the same way soon. I'd love to be able to just not have all of the "smart" features that they kill well within the lifespan of the TV and instead offload them to an external box. At least the Samsung didn't have huge Netflix, Amazon etc buttons on the remote, like the LG, which will end up doing nothing some day.
    - CWuestefeld 8y ago
      This is a mega-tangent, but... Frankly, if you're dumb enough to buy a smart TV, this is what you deserve. It should be obvious that (a) the expected lifespan of the hardware investment in a TV is a pretty long time - 10 years, maybe? But (b) the expected lifespan of the "smart" part is obviously much smaller: for example, you know that codecs are going to change, and computational requirements for them will increase significantly (e.g., from MPEG2->DIVX->H264->H265) on a much faster scale, maybe 2-3 years. With the hardware for the display being on drastically different horizon than that for the computation, it should be obvious that the overall product design is flawed. And it's flawed in a way that updated software will eventually be unable to cover. EDIT: obviously we want to be able to do "smart" stuff with our TVs. But the right approach for this is with separate components (e.g., Roku, Fire, Apple TV) that we can swap out as they become obsolete while retaining the longer-term investment in the display.
      - setquk 8y ago
        Fair points and totally agree. I was dumb enough (I would use the same words!) to buy one the first time round so I agree with you.
- jacobush 8y ago
  I have a high end QLED Samsung TV. Horrible, horrible. Audio over HDMI does not work. Had to use optical cable to receiver. Apps hang and have to be reinstalled to recover them, or power yanked at wall socket. It randomly switches from TV or Netflix/Plex app to "HDMI2" or whatever when watching a movie. Doesn't matter if using an external device like an Apple TV - so you can't even treat it like a dumb display, which was my fallback for my previous "Smart" Philips TV. (It only had horribly slow UI, but was stable.) The panel is top notch. QLED to me is a perfect balance between the over-saturated colors of OLED, and the gray blacks of LED. But Samsung and software... it never works. Sync photos from Android phone to PC? Oh, the PC software only does 1000 photos at a time. Then you must delete 1000 photos and start over, rinse repeat. That's 22 times if you are helping a friend backup a few years of photos. Each time I encounter a Samsung device with "smart" anything in it, I think, no it must be OK this time. It can't be that so disparate divisions all produce crappy code, over the more than a decade now I've been following them. But yes. Every. Fucking. Time.
  - alias_neo 8y ago
    This is the reason I went LG this time, my Samsung TV has all of the issues you're describing. The LG is marginally better but it still has issues with audio over ARC and figuring out when to switch on the surround amp and when not to. It'll also randomly switch back to the ARC input if something connected gives it a nudge, while I'm doing something else. I bought high-end in both cases and it really makes you grit your teeth to realise they can't get this right even at the prices you're paying.

craftyguy 8y ago

Gosh, the more recent microsoft acquisitions (e.g. linkedin, github, etc) won't suffer the same fate, right?

pmlnr 8y ago
LinkedIn would deserve it though.
- setquk 8y ago
  I’m not sure you could make LinkedIn worse if you tried.
- Tor3 8y ago
  I took a final look at Linkedin some weeks ago.. hadn't logged in in ages. Totally useless, never-ending scrolling pages, tried to look like FB I guess. No informational content anywhere. So I deleted my account. Something I've had in mind since MS bought it. The updated layout was the final nail in the coffin. No more Linkedin for me, and definitely nothing to miss.
  - LadyCailin 8y ago
    Eh. Both of my last two jobs were through LinkedIn, so if nothing else, it’s worth it for that. Having said that, the social features are fairly useless, and other than when I’ve been actively searching for jobs, I don’t really use it.
toper-centage 8y ago
Linked also suffered the same fate. They pushed it so hard for it to be a mainstream social media for professionals. Problem is that no one wants to use it as such.
- alanfranzoni 8y ago
  Sort feed by date -> OK. But the setting is not retained. Terrible.

bertil 8y ago

> I'm looking forward to a Microsoft insider's exposé I interviewed there, soon after the acquisition, maybe nine months. Probably one of the most shocking experiences in many aspects: they flew me from Europe, no one was ready to talk to me, or knew I was coming at all. I waited more than an hour, thought about leaving, hoping they wouldn’t mind paying for my hotel room and flight either way. Then someone who I recognised from their LinkedIn photo passed me, I said hi—they were surprised and thought the interview wasn’t happening. I had three interviews from people at most three months out of university (nothing but the same two brain-teasers); overall, the place seemed like completely lacking self-awareness. I had lunch with the only person with any experience, the UX researcher/ethnographer (six months out of post-doc) who was… way over everything. Chosen quotes: “Children running a daycare”, “the entitlement is staggering”, she was happy because that paid way better than academia and she could learn about private research, save money, go to meet-ups and interview. I liked the lunch because I had tried to make my joke during the interview, one about how Skype allows me to get three alerts about the birthday of a recruiter with whom I had an awkward 20-min chat six years ago (wink, wink: I care about users’ experience too). Blank stare from Chad. The UX researcher got it. It wasn’t funny, but at least I felt like I had pushed my bug report at the edge of my ability zone. I didn’t get a call-back. I was stranded for six months on an email chain with the recruitment coordinator who was only able to reimburse me with a paper check in dollars (I had bank accounts in four different currencies at that point but not dollars). I honestly think that I got so tired of it all that I just forgot… Or maybe I ended up cashing it at pennies on the dollar because my bank had pity on me. Anyway, a couple of years later, a new colleague at Facebook joins from there. The guy spent his first three months listing all the terrible, terrible things he saw there. Just new ways of being broken, every day over lunch, for a hundred days. I was impressed. That guy isn’t shy. Not sure he’s a great writer, but there was a lot to be learned there.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
This is disturbing. Satya, are you there?
- java-man 8y ago
  He is busy pushing code to overwrite users' font preferences and install multigigabyte updates...