4 ms·

It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid. They already had everyone and everything in place! But the app is a buggy mess, far worse than Teams,

It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid. They already had everyone and everything in place! But the app is a buggy mess, far worse than Teams, and they just refused to do anything about it. I guess MS-internal politics? They had their own Teams and that was the preferred product?

notTooFarGone 2y ago
The codebase is reportedly the biggest mess and impossible to navigate. In that light is just crystal clear why you would want to reinvent the wheel.
- ratg13 2y ago
  They’ve rebuilt popular software many times over in the past. Even with Skype they rebuilt the entire backend as well when they moved it from a decentralized platform to a centralized platform. I struggle to believe that this theory holds any water. It also lends support to an old conspiracy theory that the primary driver for Microsoft buying Skype was so that the service could be centralized so that communications could be monitored and intercepted.
  - boznz 2y ago
    they had to rebuild it, original Skype was written in delphi
  - rhubarbtree 2y ago
    > They’ve rebuilt popular software many times over in the past. Ironically, I think this list includes Teams.
    - dijit 2y ago
      The calling functionality of Teams seems to be based on skype. (if strings, binary layout and even some subprocess names are to be believed)
      - EionRobb 2y ago
        Can confirm, as a Teams and Skype protocol reverse engineerer for Pidgin, that most of the Teams protocol including text messages started as Skype (not the decentralised one) and has had additional layers of stuff added over the years on top. The calling for both Skype and Teams still uses a websocket with a "reverse webhook" called Trouter, which lets the client respond to events as if it were a webserver responding to webhooks, and then does a handoff to WebRTC. When I first started writing the Teams protocol plugin for libpurple, it was easier to start with the Skype plugin than to start from scratch.
  - fifticon 2y ago
    No conspiracy neeeded. The simple reasons they bought it was: 1 to buy the users 2 to reign in an upstart empire 3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand 4 to be able to peddle 'Lync' They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly; they changed skype from something to chase and desire, to something to avoid :-/. A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync, which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product. As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'. It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to. For a range of years, the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other.. /s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call.. /s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service - "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices", "you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype", "you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype", "you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",. So, skype going from 'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to 'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!' Enshittification galore.
WalterBright 2y ago
> they just refused to do anything about it Whenever I reboot my computer, Skype installs an update.
Espressosaurus 2y ago
It was 100% the preferred product. AFAIK Skype was deprecated internally well before COVID.
pjmlp 2y ago
If it was only Skype, Windows development has turned into a mess, it appears teams are filled with newly grads, without any background on Windows development, or Windows developer culture. That is why there are now Webview2 usage all over the place, and after 5 years WinUI 3.0 is still behind the WinForms, WPF and even MFC development experience, even though it should have been a plain port of UWP/WinUI 2.0 into standard Win32 infrastructure, so adding almost another 10 years on top (WinRT platform came out in 2012). EDIT: it was actually 2012, not 2014.
- kennysoona 2y ago
  This is why they tried to remake the Windows interface to be more Mac like as well. What a disgrace.
- DanielHB 2y ago
  I imagine internally they have a hard time staffing the Teams project. Like VSCode is a WebView2 project but it is miles ahead of Teams in quality. At least on the client side features seems far more complex too. Teams used to use Angular 1 and I think they are still migrating out of it. Microsoft would need to pay me a lot of money to want to dive into that mess. I imagine there are a lot of devs who would love to be VSCode core developers though.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    It was also React Electron for a while, but that isn't the only issue with Teams, even if we comparing them running as pure Web application across browser tabs, Teams, Slack, Discord,..... I really don't know what the Teams team does all day long.
    - DanielHB 2y ago
      Dealing with old crappy codebases can really tank a product, especially if you don't have management support to fix the broken practices. I imagine the Teams project gets a lot of pressure to deliver features instead of fixing the underlying problems. While the VSCode project probably only occasionally gets a push from upper management (like to add copilot stuff) Delivering features on top of an unmaintainable mess just makes the mess bigger.
NoLinkToMe 2y ago
> It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid. Afaik Skype was a buggy mess and thereby not a good foundation for development, and very much had a reputation of being software for consumers, not businesses, so not a good foundation to make money. Microsoft meanwhile is a corporate powerhouse, not a consumer powerhouse. Most of its profits are from corporate software and servers. So it made sense that they developed MS Teams as a corporate product for their Office product range. It's closing in on half a billion users and its annual (!) revenue already exceeds the purchase price of Skype. 90% of fortune 100 companies use it, and I think it's the go-to product for virtually all corporates that run on PC/Windows. Not doing this sooner (14 years ago) is where they definitely dropped the ball. But during covid? I think MS completely nailed it with a hugely succesful rollout of an integrated tech in MS Teams.

notTooFarGone 2y ago

The codebase is reportedly the biggest mess and impossible to navigate. In that light is just crystal clear why you would want to reinvent the wheel.

ratg13 2y ago
They’ve rebuilt popular software many times over in the past. Even with Skype they rebuilt the entire backend as well when they moved it from a decentralized platform to a centralized platform. I struggle to believe that this theory holds any water. It also lends support to an old conspiracy theory that the primary driver for Microsoft buying Skype was so that the service could be centralized so that communications could be monitored and intercepted.
- boznz 2y ago
  they had to rebuild it, original Skype was written in delphi
- rhubarbtree 2y ago
  > They’ve rebuilt popular software many times over in the past. Ironically, I think this list includes Teams.
  - dijit 2y ago
    The calling functionality of Teams seems to be based on skype. (if strings, binary layout and even some subprocess names are to be believed)
    - EionRobb 2y ago
      Can confirm, as a Teams and Skype protocol reverse engineerer for Pidgin, that most of the Teams protocol including text messages started as Skype (not the decentralised one) and has had additional layers of stuff added over the years on top. The calling for both Skype and Teams still uses a websocket with a "reverse webhook" called Trouter, which lets the client respond to events as if it were a webserver responding to webhooks, and then does a handoff to WebRTC. When I first started writing the Teams protocol plugin for libpurple, it was easier to start with the Skype plugin than to start from scratch.
- fifticon 2y ago
  No conspiracy neeeded. The simple reasons they bought it was: 1 to buy the users 2 to reign in an upstart empire 3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand 4 to be able to peddle 'Lync' They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly; they changed skype from something to chase and desire, to something to avoid :-/. A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync, which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product. As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'. It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to. For a range of years, the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other.. /s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call.. /s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service - "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices", "you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype", "you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype", "you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",. So, skype going from 'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to 'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!' Enshittification galore.

WalterBright 2y ago

> they just refused to do anything about it Whenever I reboot my computer, Skype installs an update.

Espressosaurus 2y ago

It was 100% the preferred product. AFAIK Skype was deprecated internally well before COVID.

pjmlp 2y ago

If it was only Skype, Windows development has turned into a mess, it appears teams are filled with newly grads, without any background on Windows development, or Windows developer culture. That is why there are now Webview2 usage all over the place, and after 5 years WinUI 3.0 is still behind the WinForms, WPF and even MFC development experience, even though it should have been a plain port of UWP/WinUI 2.0 into standard Win32 infrastructure, so adding almost another 10 years on top (WinRT platform came out in 2012). EDIT: it was actually 2012, not 2014.

kennysoona 2y ago
This is why they tried to remake the Windows interface to be more Mac like as well. What a disgrace.
DanielHB 2y ago
I imagine internally they have a hard time staffing the Teams project. Like VSCode is a WebView2 project but it is miles ahead of Teams in quality. At least on the client side features seems far more complex too. Teams used to use Angular 1 and I think they are still migrating out of it. Microsoft would need to pay me a lot of money to want to dive into that mess. I imagine there are a lot of devs who would love to be VSCode core developers though.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  It was also React Electron for a while, but that isn't the only issue with Teams, even if we comparing them running as pure Web application across browser tabs, Teams, Slack, Discord,..... I really don't know what the Teams team does all day long.
  - DanielHB 2y ago
    Dealing with old crappy codebases can really tank a product, especially if you don't have management support to fix the broken practices. I imagine the Teams project gets a lot of pressure to deliver features instead of fixing the underlying problems. While the VSCode project probably only occasionally gets a push from upper management (like to add copilot stuff) Delivering features on top of an unmaintainable mess just makes the mess bigger.

NoLinkToMe 2y ago

> It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid. Afaik Skype was a buggy mess and thereby not a good foundation for development, and very much had a reputation of being software for consumers, not businesses, so not a good foundation to make money. Microsoft meanwhile is a corporate powerhouse, not a consumer powerhouse. Most of its profits are from corporate software and servers. So it made sense that they developed MS Teams as a corporate product for their Office product range. It's closing in on half a billion users and its annual (!) revenue already exceeds the purchase price of Skype. 90% of fortune 100 companies use it, and I think it's the go-to product for virtually all corporates that run on PC/Windows. Not doing this sooner (14 years ago) is where they definitely dropped the ball. But during covid? I think MS completely nailed it with a hugely succesful rollout of an integrated tech in MS Teams.