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The Skype client is total garbage as well, so apparently nobody at Microsoft can make a chat client.
by bluedino 6y ago
The Skype client is total garbage as well, so apparently nobody at Microsoft can make a chat client.
- toast0 6y agoMaybe nobody recently, Comic Chat was epic (and certainly guilty of embrace and extend)
- oarsinsync 6y ago> and certainly guilty of embrace and extend But the only thing it managed to extinguish was itself. IRC long outlived comic chat (and thank goodness for that, IMO).
- Spooky23 6y agoI talk about the universal law of chat client entropy. Chat peaked in 2000/2001 with AIM and Yahoo. Everything else get worse over time. Chat isn’t a product that can stand alone, so it’s always attached to another agenda. Skype was an interoperable phone with chat attached. Teams is a SharePoint client that has chat.
- quesera 6y agoI don't think there was anything about AIM/Yahoo that was better than IRC.
- Spooky23 6y agoNormal people could use it! The UI was pretty simple. IRC at some level had all of the features, but a learning cliff. My company at the time had E2E encryption with client certificates on AIM.
- quesera 6y agoRight, that's the sadness of it. IRC clients were lacking, and the "auth for free" that came with AIM/Yahoo (and now Facebook) made the difference. It would have been 100x simpler to create a compelling GUI client for IRC (back in the day, they sort of exist now), than to build an entire new protocol, server infrastructure, and GUI client to support a branded and controlled chat. Never mind multiple competing and incompatible versions of same. Conflicting interests, obviously. But as a technology, "chat" did not improve materially between 1990 and 2010 or so.
- qppo 6y agoto be fair to microsoft, both Sype and Lync were acquisitions. Lync chat was pretty good before it became Skype for Business
- athenot 6y agoAnd Skype was a great client before it got turned into a crappy version of MSN.
- prepend 6y agoMSN Messenger was pretty good.