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I am not even sure if Microsoft was interested in the technology. I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network. I believe Microsoft repl
by wsc981 2y ago
I am not even sure if Microsoft was interested in the technology. I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network. I believe Microsoft replaced this way of working shortly after acquiring Skype. Perhaps on behalf of security agencies.
- caseyy 2y agoPerhaps. I would more readily believe that if Microsoft didn't have an established pattern of killing competitor companies and tech. I think they really tried to merge Skype with Live Messenger, stripping Skype for parts. And maybe those parts weren't the tech as much as the brand, but we don't know how much tech they adopted.
- mrweasel 2y agoI seem to recall that Skype had the concept of "super nodes" which could facilitate NAT traversal for of users which didn't have a direct internet connection. Microsoft got rid of that pretty fast and replaced it with Microsoft managed servers (which to be fair seems less sketchy that using random users machines as something akin to a STUN server).
- grishka 2y ago> I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network. It did! It was some impressively cool tech too. At the time, at least in my country, some ISPs would disable your internet access when you didn't pay, but the LAN between subscribers still worked. So obviously nothing worked, except Skype. My theory then was that it would find a path to route around the disconnection by having the Skype client of a different subscriber on the same LAN, that did have internet access, relay your traffic to the rest of the network.
- machomaster 2y agoThis approach to technology has serious problems. I would send a message to someone and turned off my computer, thinking that the message would be sent whenever the recipient was online. However, that was not the case. The message only arrived when we were online at the same time. Therefore, Skype is completely useless as a tool for asynchronous communication, for the main type of messaging!
- grishka 2y agoMaybe, but somehow it didn't matter very much back then. I remember using private chats mostly as an addition to calls, i.e. when I wanted to send someone a link or a file I was talking about. If I wanted to just send a message to someone regardless of whether they were online, Skype wasn't really an option I considered, it was ICQ, later VKontakte, and now Telegram. Group chats in Skype though, those were popular. Nothing else had good group chats at the time, but then again, after VK introduced them, everyone I know quickly moved there. I don't know how message delivery worked there, but you could receive messages that were sent while you were offline just fine. Maybe you got them from any one online participant, or maybe the "supernodes" did some sort of store-and-forward thing, or maybe a bit of both.
- machomaster 2y agoThis is true if you were young and hanged around other teenagers. But when communicating with family or with business contacts Skype was the main way, incl. when it came to instant messaging.
- nielssp 2y agoI'm pretty sure that's how most, if not all, instant messaging services worked 20 years ago... Was a feature, not a bug. The whole idea of sending an instant message. If you wanted to send a non-instant message, you'd send an email instead.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- grishka 2y agoICQ worked more like SMS. You could send a message to someone who's offline. It would get stored on the server and delivered when they come online.
- machomaster 2y agoThat' not true. Icq and other messengers (don't remember the names anymore) had async messaging functionality and that was expected.