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Ask HN: Why Doesn't Microsoft Fix Skype?
I think it's hard to argue that the current version of skype is an improvement over classic skype. It's much worse when switching between concurrent calls, and almost unusable with multiple people. Options to keep notifications on a single device only are missing. Skype contacts and calls end up into the phone's contact list. Why is it taking years for microsoft to put out a decent version of skype , or at least one that was as functional as skype classic?
- happymellon 7y agoIf you think Skype is bad, you should try Skype for Business. Microsoft really don't care about its customers if you judge it on that application.
- m-p-3 7y agoImagine my surprise when I discovered Skype and Skype for Business don't play well together..
- nitinreddy88 7y agoOh yes, thats why they supported Windows XP for so many years and so Windows 7. Every Microsoft corporate product is supported longer than they should be (just to make customers happy/make it easy for to move rather than being bold) Not every product can be successful and its true for any company.
- AstroJetson 7y agoYep, Skype for Business reliability has taken a huge hit in the last 30 days. On top call quality has really diminished. When contacting MS got the message "Hey, you should switch to Teams!" Another case of slowly killing a current product to get people to move to the newer one. A standard MO of Microsoft for years.
- thrower123 7y agoThey clearly seem to be scaling back the servers for their hosted Skype for Business through Office 365. I agree call quality and reliability has been on a solidly downward trend over 2019. Teams isn't really up to feature parity yet, and the UI is awful; multitasking is completely impossible. Of course, the target isn't replacing SfB, actually, because Teams is really Microsoft Slack. I think things were at their best in the Lync 2010 iteration, to be honest. The most egregious thing was when they bought Skype, rebranded Lync as Skype for Business, and clearly just did a light reskin of the client with Skype colors and logos - it was over a year before the About dialog showed a minor revision bump, or stopped calling itself Lync 2013.
- randomvectors 7y agoSkype for Business is being shut down and moved to Teams over the next few weeks. Which is good news, I suppose.
- Spooky23 7y agoYou’ll miss Skype for B. Teams is a mess. An electron app that is a voice/video/chat/forum/Sharepoint front end can’t be anything else. All IM and Voice apps only get worse over time. AIM was probably the best overall client to this day. The video stuff was lacking (understanding given it was 20 years ago), but the UI wasn’t hostile, audio was great, and end to end encryption was there for those who wanted it.
- randomvectors 7y agoAt work we've had both Skype for Business and Teams running in parallel with the freedom to use what we like. I prefer Teams to the point where I don't even turn on Skype anymore.
- Spooky23 7y agoIt depends on what you use. The big issue is that it’s a memory pig and folks with constrained resources or working with other piggy apps have a lousy experience. It works a lot better in your normal Chrome browser! The other thing is that people can’t communicate between teams and Skype in many scenarios. There are also potential compliance gotchas for some scenarios that are difficult to identify. I’m wary of anything new with Microsoft as when you stray from the happy path, (which changes over time) they don’t test or fix regressions anymore and create downstream problems.
- Chyzwar 7y agoTeams is equally horrible.
- gtirloni 7y agoThe app is designed towards satisfying the need of most users. They see Skype as a single app, whether it's used on mobile or desktop, so it makes sense that calls and contacts are synchronized. If you start a chat on the desktop client, you want to be able to continue it on your phone. Same thing with notifications. This separation you want feels unnatural (and I remember it was actually a complain most people had when it was not like that). Could you elaborate on the difficulty with concurrent calls? I'm never in two or more calls at the same time so I'm curious. I really don't like the current design because they took a lot of options away (e.g. you can't customize the themes that much and they look ugly to me). However, at least on Linux, it seems to be improving. I think they are trying to be everything to everybody, power users and non-tech mobile users and are failing at both. The network effect part of this makes it hard to separate those two audiences though. Is there a call/chat app that you like better?
- buboard 7y ago> you want to be able to continue it on your phone. OK i understand that, but at least have the option to somehow have "less than 3 phones and computers ringing at the same time for a call". Also , i know it s a windows thing , but i dont want to receive msg notifications on a computer if skype is not running on it (but i do want notifications if i have it running). [I should note i m talking about the desktop version] > Could you elaborate on the difficulty with concurrent calls? Allow popping out each chat window separately. Switching from a call to a text message of another user causes redrawing the entire page and loses the layout every time. It's very annoying. Also don't reset the setting of (view full video) whenever i resize the window. > Is there a call/chat app that you like better? Good question. Zoom's video chat management seems more reasonable, and as for the chat, just use the skype classic layout, it's simple. In fact yes i think i like skype classic better ;)
- joezydeco 7y agoMy corp uses a Microsoft Office stack and we've been told Skype is being deactivated and everyone needs to move to Teams. So the answer as I see it is "because of Teams".
- jmkni 7y agoI think Skype for business is moving to teams, regular Skype is staying.
- DarkStar851 7y agoThis is right. They're finally killing Lync.
- prepend 7y agoTeams is so bad. It’s surprising how they only needed to clone Slack, but instead it’s a weird mixup of a giant desktop app that tries to mix Skype, OneDrive, and SharePoint for some bizarre reason.
- jeromebaek 7y agoTeams is meant to be the modern replacement.
- zeeed 7y agoTeams is not a replacement of SFB but a performance-hungry, battery-killing, unusably slow and overloaded poor mash-up of Skype, SharePoint and Mail in an attempt to beat Slack.
- randomvectors 7y agoNot too hard to beat Slack's user experience though.
- mycall 7y agoMatrix.org has some interesting new ideas beyond slack
- randomvectors 7y agoI just checked out Riot. Looks nice.
- Chyzwar 7y agoBeside Discord, everything else is pretty bad compared to Slack. Microsft and Google failed to deliver anything usable for the last 10 years.
- MH15 7y agoDiscord and VSCode really seem to prove that there can be good Electron apps. These apps are great, and take advantage of the perks of web technologies. Now when I look at Slack or Atom...
- ijidak 7y agoFormer microsoftie, here. From years of observation, it seems Microsoft tends to ignore products in industries that are in 1 of 2 states: 1. Stagnant growth 2. Low competition Skype is in the former. It's embedded deep in the culture to follow rather than lead. (Edit: I should add that it's not that Microsoft doesn't try to lead, its just that generally they aren't very good at it. They are much better as a second mover. Far more so it seems than other companies.) Most of their great products were a response to a rapid rise of a competitor. Windows after Apple's GUI. Word after Wordperfect. Excel after Lotus 1 2 3. IE after Netscape. Azure after AWS. C# & .NET after Java. SQL Server after Oracle. Once the industry stops growing or there is no competition, the product is neglected or drifts listlessly unless another company causes the space to boom financially again or gain mindshare, in which case Microsoft might start moving again. (The only place where Microsoft truly leads is in developer platforms, because they are a company of developers, so they get it better than the other products they offer.) Don't get me wrong, I use Microsoft products almost exclusively. I've just learned to be very depressed when Microsoft doesn't face an existential threat with the piece of software I use. The product will inevitably drift and likely even get worse over time, until another company can create an existential threat (like Chrome has done to an extent) and literally drag Microsoft kicking and screaming into putting serious thought into the product again. It's just in their DNA, I guess... But when they do finally get around to it, they usually do something cool. See VS Code, WSL, etc. So we just need someone to make Skype-like products cool again, and ideally start making millions upon millions in the process, and then Skype will improve. :)
- mickelsen 7y agoWow, this is a new angle I never thought about on the company's culture. It could also explain Microsoft's more aggressive approach against Linux/Open Source in the early 00s. Also agree about developer tools, currently they are on point.
- gesman 7y agoBallmer era was typical example of that MSFT stagnation and me-too always-late-to-the-party type of moves.