10 ms·

The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic to maintain or even expand their lead in video conferencing, while allowing a complete

The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic to maintain or even expand their lead in video conferencing, while allowing a complete unknown (outside of the corporate world, at least) like Zoom to become the dominant platform, should be studied in business schools. The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling that, based on personal experience, it is still used in place of FaceTime and other services, especially by older people.

bayindirh 2y ago
I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before. It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much. After it's marred, they didn't try to mend it much, and when it started to work well due to better bandwidth, they didn't push it back again. It fell to the wayside of "value-adds" all Windows software vendors love to put in the bag. > "Oh you get the whole Office, great. There's some Skype for you, too. You know it doesn't work well, but it won't hurt to have it installed, no?" So they blew their chances, badly. I personally don't like Microsoft, but they could have made me use it, if it worked well. Now I use Meet, which is again bundled with Google One, but it's web based and works much better. It also supports the nice features (noise cancelling, advanced backgrounds and whatnot) under Firefox, too.
- dcminter 2y ago
  Personally I think their big, incomprehensibly stupid manoeuver was the Skype vs Skype for Business (Link) split. Had they merged them into a single client that could speak either protocol and share contact lists the story would have been very different. Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this? Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    > Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it? I remember somebody saying "Micorosft is an amalgam of different power centers and dynamics. Some people inside genuinely loves open source and wants to be part of that, and some hate it like it's the evil itself. So, there's in-fighting and power struggles in many areas in Microsoft". I think the comment came after a project manager personally gutted .NET Core's Hot Reload support to give closed source parts a boost, and things got very ugly both inside and outside of Microsoft.
    - 3D30497420 2y ago
      Obligatory "Internal structure of tech companies": https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/internal_structure_of_tech_companies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
      - teddyh 2y ago
        Link to original artist: <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts> (Including a partial update: <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update>)
      - robotnikman 2y ago
        The Oracle one always gets me lmao
  - decimalenough 2y ago
    Lync was completely unrelated software with a different tech stack that was just branded as Skype. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business
    - dcminter 2y ago
      I know, that's my point - branding Lync (thanks for the correction, I forgot the spelling) damaged the Skype brand to no real benefit. I know Teams is fairly pervasive, but that's on the usual Microsoft Enterprise stranglehold, certainly not on Teams' merits or riding the popularity of Skype pre Microsoft.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        I don't much care for Teams but I write that off to basically not using the Microsoft Office suite at all and maybe doing a Teams call once every 6 months, if that.
      - soundnote 2y ago
        It's not just the enterprise stranglehold, though that's surely part of it. But Teams, at least today and on Windows, is GOOD. It works well for internal meetings and chat, calls are good, and on the unregistered outsider webinar attendee experience, Teams has just been better than Zoom in my experience. Also, even if you just want to buy Teams, from what I've checked the barebones Teams only packages MS sells for smaller orgs are still cheaper than Slack. Actually, let's see... yeap, Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user, Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo, M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo.
        jcelerier 2y ago
        > But Teams, at least today and on Windows, is GOOD. I don't remember the last time I had a meeting on teams that didn't include a rant about teams
  - Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    I think it was the other way around, they know about the issues with Skype and built something new, but they knew the power of the Skype brand so they slapped it onto their new product.
    - dcminter 2y ago
      I think that must have been the logic. I just contend that it was a stupid approach! They damaged their consumer brand badly to give an imperceptible boost to the business product their customers were already locked into.
  - hnlurker22 2y ago
    This is what happens when you hire leet code engineers and they become managers. Look at Google now. This isn't some magical outcome of big corps. A big corp is practically the people who work there.
    - ljm 2y ago
      It’s not really about ‘leet code engineers’ getting into management but the perverse incentives involved in climbing up the corporate ladder. It’s as if it doesn’t matter what project you pitch and what the fallout is as long as some KPI somewhere gets a boost. Just get your promotion and ride off into the sunset, someone else will deal with the aftermath.
      - potato3732842 2y ago
        It's not just about incentives. It's about selecting for the kind of people who succeed under those incentive structures. Even if you're hiring a cross section of the population or a cross section of software developers or management professionals only a slice of it is gonna stick around long enough to influence the organization. For example, you don't find a lot of Ron Swanson types working for insurance, the court system, or health and safety. Those personality types are either gonna find a new job, turn into a bitter shell of a person counting the days to retirement or go postal and finding a new job is obviously the superior option. The comparison between Google and Microsoft (or whatever) is gonna be similar though the differences will be more nuanced. Same thing for big banks. Same for big oil. Same for big anything. You've got these differing corporate cultures and incentive sets and they select for different people.
      - snoman 2y ago
        At Microsoft, for every Principal Engineer/Manager there’s a dead internal project that nobody uses but had “… lots of impact.”
    - bayindirh 2y ago
      Microsoft is built on completely different ethos and evolved from there. (I think it was Paul Allen is who said it) "Microsoft is a corporation built upon the idea of intellectual property". So being closed source, aggressive safeguarding of IP and locking users in is the DNA of Microsoft. Yes, company is made of people, but there's also a foundational DNA. When you keep that DNA alive, the company changes and eats the people fed into it, without evolving (See Apple, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.). Google's DNA has been changed from the top from a powerful but gentle giant to subtle but very evil giant.
  - windex 2y ago
    >Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this? Management by committees. Lots of office politics. Most senior execs have successfully failed upwards. Once every 18 months they let go of people they stick the blame on thereby losing any memory of design decisions.
    - 3vidence 2y ago
      I feel like I'm currently experiencing failing upwards. I had a kid recently and have been putting less into my work, mostly just pushing back on asks and delegating because I don't have time. All of a sudden I have senior management potential haha. Feels like I'm living in the movie office space
  - addicted 2y ago
    Skype for Business, which was really just a rebranding of Microsoft Lync, destroyed the Skype brand. But it also indirectly damaged both variations. Skype for Business became less of a “business” software like Lync was. So unlike Lync, which was fairly spartan but information dense, Skype for Business added a ton of white space, colors, icons, etc making it less efficient and less serious than Lync. At the same time, Skype itself became purely consumer and went way down that route, focusing more on Temu like animation gimmicks than actually being a communication tool for friends and families.
  - htrp 2y ago
    > Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it? Yes. rivalry is at it's finest (and fiercest) when you're fighting your peer divisions inside the same company.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    Microsoft had MANY opportunities for this, Google as well for that matter. Especially if you consider Instant Messenger clients. I absolutely loved Google Hangouts when it was the all in one solution (including GV and SMS integration on the phone). MS(N) Messenger could have been very close as well a couple times. It's the management decisions to try to dramatically change or replace things that lands with lesser solutions in the end. Because the incentives and bonus structure are mostly screwed up in many of these companies. Skype could have been the best, be all, end all solution for MS and brought everyone to their knees and just killed them. But it wasn't the first, or last time this would happen.
- nickdothutton 2y ago
  Easier to monitor if centralised.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Yes, everyone and their Windows installs and their _NSAKEY guessed the reason was that.
- tombert 2y ago
  > I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before. Maybe; I think people forget how horrible Skype was on your phone battery when it was still P2P. The P2P-ness of it was definitely pretty cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the decreased battery. > It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much. Honestly I've been using Skype to talk to my parents ever since I moved out of my parents place in 2012, and for the last decade or so, it's been perfectly fine. I know it's kind of a meme to hate on it, but it never really was an issue for me.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I think they killed it when they migrated user login to a Microsoft accounts that nobody used or wanted. For me at least, it made Skype with synonymous with trying to figure out the email and doing a password reset
- Lammy 2y ago
  > I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before. Story in two headlines: - “NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution” https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f... (2009) - “Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?” https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ (2011)
  - qingcharles 2y ago
    Well, the better ask is why eBay bought it...
    - Scoundreller 2y ago
      And even when eBay thought they bought it, apparently they didn’t buy all of it: https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/06/ebay_skype/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/06/ebay_skype/ https://www.hugheshubbard.com/news/the-best-laid-m-a-plans-how-a-dispute-over-ownership-of-critical-ip-may-threaten-ebays-sale-of-skype https://www.hugheshubbard.com/news/the-best-laid-m-a-plans-h...
      - hedgehog 2y ago
        Oh it gets better. Apparently some of the stuff they didn't get dated back to Kazaa. Some of the Skype founders were under indictment and traveling incognito while they raised money for the new company.
        pests 2y ago
        I had interacted with Pritt Kasesalu (PrittK) when I was very young. In the late 90/early 00s I played an MMO developed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) named Subspace, released in the mid 90s. It was a top down astroids-like space game with maps of up to 100 or more players, even back then. The game shut down officially but the server leaked and became community ran. The original client was not very secure so hacking and cheating became common. Out of nowhere comes Continuum, a ground up reimplementation of the Subspace client by none other than PrittK, completely eliminating any cheats but changing nothing of gameplay or UI. He went on to co-own the largest server, Trench Wars, with another player named Dock. There he did custom game bots and other chat-tools. There were rumors that he was involved with Kazaa back then and later on I find out he goes on to be involved with Skype and Joost. Continuum continued to grow and thrive. The backend server was eventually reimplemented into A Small Subspace Server (ASSS) so now this game was a complete user recreation of the original. Well, minus the graphics which was in limbo from some sale to a third party company but they never had complaints. Then a few years ago we grt the game green lit on steam. Little trek down memory lane. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530450/Continuum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530450/Continuum/
- sznio 2y ago
  Part of it was that performance was abysmal. Everyone jumped to Discord (an electron app!) when it released, because it performed better.
  - theultdev 2y ago
    From the circles I was in, everyone jumped from Skype / Mumble / Teamspeak because of D/DoS attacks after having their ip exposed. It happened all the time because booters were so popular and widely available, costing about $5/mo via paypal. People were willing to put up with more delay (over p2p) to prevent having to trust each person that joins the TS. Skype transitioned away from p2p because mobile phones were not very powerful and they needed a lot of supernodes. First desktop apps were the supernodes, then it turned into centralized servers entirely.
    - Nullabillity 2y ago
      Mumble was never P2P.
- mihaaly 2y ago
  I think they killed it by making it unusable through forcing dubious UI/UX/design-principle/other-bs trends for no compelling reason at all on a perfectly good interface.
- DrFalkyn 2y ago
  Sadly this is the culture now at tech companies. All the data has to go through company servers, whether it makes technical sense or not Pretty sure I flunked a system design question this reason. I was asked to design an online chat system. I asked of they wanted support for groups, they said no. So I gave them simple two way socket solution. Apparently that wasn’t good enough, They wanted a full DB storing everyone’s conversations, that you could query, etc. I suspected it had nothing to do with any technical considerations. They just wanted that data.
  - pests 2y ago
    Did they want multi device? How do you sync messages? History?
    - DrFalkyn 2y ago
      You can sync with timestamps History can be stored locally Centralizing this just seems way more complicated to me, unless you want groups. Even then for small groups P2P isn’t such a terrible idea Not sure what you mean by multidevice, I do t think they cared about mobile
  - niutech 2y ago
    There are also Jami and Tox as decentralized Slack alternatives.
    - johnisgood 2y ago
      Or Mattermost, Zulip, or... Briar, among others. :P
      - niutech 2y ago
        Mattermost and Zulip aren't decentralized.
        johnisgood 2y ago
- tomjen3 2y ago
  Skype was born in a world of laptops and either wireless or otherwise unmetered internet. You can have a P2P system there. In a world where the primary interface is a mobile phone, you can't just run a piece of software on a mobile phone. If you do that Skype will just be known as the app that completely destroys your battery randomly and for no seeming reason.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  Smartphones killed Skypes strong P2P presence.
OvbiousError 2y ago
Almost everything I do for work uses teams, so I can't say MS missed any boats. It's spectacular how pervasive teams is given how universally reviled it is. I'd personally switch back to slack in a heartbeat for instance.
- l33tman 2y ago
  Don't know about Slack's videoconf, but Slack's cheap insistence that we pay a rip-off amount of money per month for storing some TEXT messages more than 90 days has continuously degraded my appreciation for it over the last years to the level of me hating it now. They're so cheap. Just put a quota on total storage or something, that actually map to their costs.. We have a Slack for a shared office of 10 people or so, we use it to like ask each other for where to go for lunch or general stuff, it must cost them $0.001/month to host, but you continuously get a banner that says PAY TO UNLOCK THESE EXCITING OLD MESSAGES all over it, and when you check what they want, they want some exorbitant amount like $10/month/user so $100/month for a lunch-synchronization tool. For $100/month I can store like 5 TB on S3, that's a lot of texts. I'm genuinely curious why they don't have some other payment option, I'd be happy to pay $1/month/user for some basic level if they just don't want freeloaders there. Well, I wouldn't be happy.. but still :)
  - OskarS 2y ago
    Slack is primarily a business tool, and for a business tool $10/user/month is extremely reasonable for the value (perceived or real) it brings. The company has to make money, and you do that by charging for your products and services, and that price is not exorbitant.
    - SR2Z 2y ago
      The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the retention to 1yr. Nothing is as frustrating as looking for an old conversation referenced in a doc and being smugly told by some corporate dick that Slack isn't for documentation and if it were important info, clearly someone should have saved it. Never mind who, it should just magically happen. The gap between "messages last for 30 days" and "Slack keeps a searchable record of all your business decisions in a useful way, forever" is huge. I can pretty easily see the value of the latter but it seems to freak executives out for some reason...
7bit 2y ago
What? Teams was and is everywhere. The opportunity was taken so hard, the EU ruled that Teams must be decoupled from the Office Suite and Windows because it was near impossible to not have or use Teams. All that happened because and during the pandemic.
kaon_ 2y ago
This. In German the word for "video-calling" is "Skyping". Similar to MSN, the strength of the brand and goodwill that it has in some geographies is on-par with Google for search, or Coca Cola for coke. The fact that the software got consistently worse, year on year on year is hard to grasp for me. Microsoft made the right call to cannibalize and use teams. But how was Skype such a pain? Not being able to share screenshots in chat killed it for me.
- harvey9 2y ago
  Coke is a trademark owned by Coca-Cola - the generic word is cola. Their brand is so strong that even though you were thinking about the topic of branding they still got you!
  - jimmydddd 2y ago
    "Yes, in many parts of Europe, people commonly use the word "coke" as a generic term for soda, similar to how it is used in the American South, essentially referring to any type of cola beverage rather than just the Coca-Cola brand; this is because Coca-Cola is so widely recognized across the continent." --Google's ai thing
    - eythian 2y ago
      Interesting, where I lived (NZ), "coke" was the typical term for Coca-Cola (not generic soda, but you may be asked if Pepsi is OK), however in NL where I live now it's pretty universally "cola", and I think that's also not generic. Can't speak to other European countries though, I've never noticed.
      - macintux 2y ago
        In the U.S., it tends to be a regional thing. Coke, soda, pop are all in common use as the general term for soft drinks.
      - arp242 2y ago
        I'd use "cola" in Dutch to refer to the generic type of drink, which is pretty much universal in Dutch AFAIK. But I would use "coke" in English. I'm not sure where I picked that up: I've lived in a combination of England/Ireland/NZ over many years, and to be honest I'm not actually sure how it's used there. Maybe just from US films? Although what I really wanted was a Pepsi, but she wouldn't give it to me. All I wanted was a Pepsi! AND SHE WOULDN'T GIVE IT TO ME!
high_na_euv 2y ago
Missed? They grew Teams, lol. Zoom - wtf, who the hell uses it after. Discord would be better example since it is huge, even LLVM community uses it
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I suspect quite a few people still use Zoom out of habit / procedure, but you can see on its stock market value that it really was a pandemic success, its stock market dropped and flattened out after 2022.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Now that I'm not at a company that uses Google Workplace, Zoom is far and away the most common video chat I see--but with a few exceptions, I think it's pretty much all just personal accounts.
- mrintegrity 2y ago
  Discord missed an opportunity to become the video calling and chat king, the smoothness of joining and leaving a group video chat when you please and the high quality video, audio and app support was exactly the kind of "just like being in the office but virtual" experience that teams, skype, slack, zoom, meet, etc lack. During peak covid it was a godsend having calls with friends and playing games together. My dream service would be very like discord but with scheduled meeting support and completely open source and self hostable.
  - bloomingkales 2y ago
    Gaming laptops today are the best AI laptops. They will never sell as well to the masses because they have a gaming aesthetic. This is true for Discord as well. Skinning HN like it's Facebook will turn you off, even if it has the content you want believe it or not.
    - mook 2y ago
      Quite a few gaming laptops these days have slightly more subdued aesthetics. Unfortunately they're still huge due to cooling requirements (or rather, because that's a dimension that can be sacrificed without too much trouble) though.
mrkramer 2y ago
>The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic They missed the huge opportunity way before on mobile and in gaming, that's when WhatsApp and Discord stepped in and destroyed Skype.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
goodmachine 2y ago
A message from the Skype CEO [NSFW] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E
- qingcharles 2y ago
  That was great :)
cynicalsecurity 2y ago
Big corporations are usually super slow and clumsy in implementing anything new or doing any quick changes.
- ycuser2 2y ago
  MS was very quick with implementing LLMs everywhere.
Clubber 2y ago
I believe they rolled the Skype technology into MS Teams and made teams their dominant video platform. MS Teams is pretty widely used based on all the complaints I hear about it. I didn't even realize Skype was still an option.
osigurdson 2y ago
Teams is used quite a bit.
ffsm8 2y ago
huh? Microsoft massively leverage their market position and spread their teams application like the plague! They just decided they like teams more then skype
randerson 2y ago
Skype should be a textbook case of how a product team will keep inventing new projects to justify their continued employment, even if it means messing with a winning formula. Skype achieved perfection a year or two after the Microsoft acquisition. At that point they should have downsized the team and focused on maintenance. Instead, they kept releasing new versions, each new version being worse than the previous one.
- novia 2y ago
  Skype was perfect BEFORE the Microsoft acquisition. Everything afterwards was unnecessary. Source: I used Skype before and after 2011.
  - alternatex 2y ago
    Group calls weren't perfect. P2P doesn't lend itself well to group calls.
- ryandrake 2y ago
  Wasn't the whole point of O.G. Skype that it was entirely peer to peer, and did not require a central service? Then, once Microsoft bought it, the first thing they did was ditch that and make it require centralized servers? IMO peak Skype was right before it was bought. Agreed though, every time Microsoft touched it, they made it worse. But many (most?) software is like that now. I dread new releases, because everyone makes software worse now.
  - genewitch 2y ago
    msmsgs.exe was p2p. Came with Windows 98, possibly 95. Video, audio, text. Maybe microsoft forgot they made that?
  - codedokode 2y ago
    The selling point of original Skype was that it allowed making audio calls on worst connections, requiring just several kilobytes/sec, and going through NATs (other products required a direct fast connection and were usable only within a local network). As for P2P, I don't think users care about that. Not having P2P is actually better because P2P can disclose your IP address. For example, Tox is a fully decentralized P2P messenger and it is not widely popular.
Izikiel43 2y ago
Microsoft didn’t miss their opportunity with COVID, teams user base grew by the millions
- tracker1 2y ago
  The anti-trust reactions may undo a lot of that, that already hasn't been undone. I know too many orgs that hate Teams and just want to stick to slack, etc. Personally, I don't really love any of them... I miss the simpler UI/UX of Instant Messenger apps or Trillian/Pidgin etc. Aside, just looked at Trillian and looks like they did a nice spin on their business model.
StableAlkyne 2y ago
Some suit was probably worried about cannibalizing their Teams business (even though Skype has better name recognition and Teams has a bad reputation). It's pretty common in the dinosaurs like Microsoft. Kodak for example had working digital cameras very early on, but didn't do anything with them because they didn't want to cannibalize their film business. Give a suit a KPI, and they're gonna optimize for that KPI.
- TylerE 2y ago
  Remember, Teams was originally "Skype for Business".
  - GrzegorzWidla 2y ago
    Originally it was Office Communicator, then Lync, then Skype for Business and now Teams.
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  Digital cameras were mostly useless in the 80s and early 90s for rank and file consumers. The demand wasn't there.
- rchaud 2y ago
  Kodak doesn't make lenses or camera hardware, so it's possible they didn't pursue digital cameras because they'd be immediately out-competed by Sony, Canon and Nikon.
acd10j 2y ago
What are you talking about? Microsoft Teams took over everything else during and after the pandemic. The reason for Skype being left behind was that everyone started using Teams in enterprises.
arp242 2y ago
When my then-girlfriend went off to study in a different country about 10 years ago, Skype was the only video call solution I was able to get working between our OS X and Linux laptops. Generally worked fairly well, too. Since then, I had forgotten it even existed: "Microsoft is killing Skype? Wasn't it dead yet?"
tshaddox 2y ago
Didn't Microsoft Teams soundly defeat Zoom, Slack, and all the others? I was under the impression that Teams has at least an order of magnitude more active users than any competitor.
- soundnote 2y ago
  It does, but Teams is mostly a thing within businesses. Skype is a consumer side brand, which MS is scuttling in favour of Teams (which is a really weird brand to try to use for consumer-side customers). They could've used Teams architecture/app and branded it as Skype, it would've made way more sense than Teams (free) which is what they're doing now. Consumer side Microsoft Accounts and business are different worlds, it'd help MS a lot to speak about them clearly. But MS and good product naming, well...
- petepete 2y ago
  Teams has more users but most of those users didn't choose Teams - it was thrust upon them. When it's bundled with O365 and shares admin tools, accounts etc, there's no wonder companies pick it. I don't know anyone who uses it outside of work.
  - tracker1 2y ago
    I tried for a bit.. it really sucks outside the work context, and much like when there were too many competing IM products, it just doesn't work without all the people. Wasn't too bad when most were under ICQ, AIM or Yahoo messenger... but after FB, Google and MS got in the mix it just went to hell mostly. Still is. I mean I have half a dozen messenger apps on my phone each with half a dozen contacts that thing $FOO messenger is better for privacy/comms/etc.
FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago
Teams (which includes the guts of Lync... aka Skype For Business) has grown into Microsoft's behemoth (320 million active daily users while Zoom only has 200k business customers and actually declined YoY). If you are talking non-business free users then sure, Zoom comes out on top.
- booleandilemma 2y ago
  Doesn't Microsoft install it on every windows laptop automatically? Are they all "users"?
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    Active daily users. Any company with Office suite (which is basically any behemoth in every single country) just uses Teams, instead of paying up for Slack.
486sx33 2y ago
It also , at least for people in some circles, doesn’t have the negative connotations that Teams does. I’m more apt to agree to a Skype type setting than someone saying let’s setup a teams meet or I’ll message you on teams. I am aware a Skype meeting and a teams meeting is essentially the same thing now, it’s just a bias in my mind.
dwedge 2y ago
During covid I asked if I could switch my monthly Skype number to annual and they said the only way is to cancel and resubscribe, with a new phone number. It was clear they didn't care even back then.
kernal 2y ago
> The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling IMO this hasn’t been true since 2020.
endofreach 2y ago
It's just insane how this is a pattern with microsoft. That should be studied. It's not meant snarky. I am really fascinated. I dislike microsoft but feel that my bias is taking over whenever i get to say things like "of course it failed– it's microsoft". But it is also true every time. Somehow microsoft has a unique talent to take things and just find ways to screw it up in ways, people couldn't imagine. That is really, really fascinating. But, of course: thank god they blow it every time. They bring the spotlight to the places where others create good things.

bayindirh 2y ago

I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before. It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much. After it's marred, they didn't try to mend it much, and when it started to work well due to better bandwidth, they didn't push it back again. It fell to the wayside of "value-adds" all Windows software vendors love to put in the bag. > "Oh you get the whole Office, great. There's some Skype for you, too. You know it doesn't work well, but it won't hurt to have it installed, no?" So they blew their chances, badly. I personally don't like Microsoft, but they could have made me use it, if it worked well. Now I use Meet, which is again bundled with Google One, but it's web based and works much better. It also supports the nice features (noise cancelling, advanced backgrounds and whatnot) under Firefox, too.

dcminter 2y ago
Personally I think their big, incomprehensibly stupid manoeuver was the Skype vs Skype for Business (Link) split. Had they merged them into a single client that could speak either protocol and share contact lists the story would have been very different. Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this? Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?
- bayindirh 2y ago
  > Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it? I remember somebody saying "Micorosft is an amalgam of different power centers and dynamics. Some people inside genuinely loves open source and wants to be part of that, and some hate it like it's the evil itself. So, there's in-fighting and power struggles in many areas in Microsoft". I think the comment came after a project manager personally gutted .NET Core's Hot Reload support to give closed source parts a boost, and things got very ugly both inside and outside of Microsoft.
  - 3D30497420 2y ago
    Obligatory "Internal structure of tech companies": https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/internal_structure_of_tech_companies/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
    - teddyh 2y ago
      Link to original artist: <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts> (Including a partial update: <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update>)
    - robotnikman 2y ago
      The Oracle one always gets me lmao
- decimalenough 2y ago
  Lync was completely unrelated software with a different tech stack that was just branded as Skype. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business
  - dcminter 2y ago
    I know, that's my point - branding Lync (thanks for the correction, I forgot the spelling) damaged the Skype brand to no real benefit. I know Teams is fairly pervasive, but that's on the usual Microsoft Enterprise stranglehold, certainly not on Teams' merits or riding the popularity of Skype pre Microsoft.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I don't much care for Teams but I write that off to basically not using the Microsoft Office suite at all and maybe doing a Teams call once every 6 months, if that.
    - soundnote 2y ago
      It's not just the enterprise stranglehold, though that's surely part of it. But Teams, at least today and on Windows, is GOOD. It works well for internal meetings and chat, calls are good, and on the unregistered outsider webinar attendee experience, Teams has just been better than Zoom in my experience. Also, even if you just want to buy Teams, from what I've checked the barebones Teams only packages MS sells for smaller orgs are still cheaper than Slack. Actually, let's see... yeap, Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user, Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo, M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo.
      - jcelerier 2y ago
        > But Teams, at least today and on Windows, is GOOD. I don't remember the last time I had a meeting on teams that didn't include a rant about teams
- Cthulhu_ 2y ago
  I think it was the other way around, they know about the issues with Skype and built something new, but they knew the power of the Skype brand so they slapped it onto their new product.
  - dcminter 2y ago
    I think that must have been the logic. I just contend that it was a stupid approach! They damaged their consumer brand badly to give an imperceptible boost to the business product their customers were already locked into.
- hnlurker22 2y ago
  This is what happens when you hire leet code engineers and they become managers. Look at Google now. This isn't some magical outcome of big corps. A big corp is practically the people who work there.
  - ljm 2y ago
    It’s not really about ‘leet code engineers’ getting into management but the perverse incentives involved in climbing up the corporate ladder. It’s as if it doesn’t matter what project you pitch and what the fallout is as long as some KPI somewhere gets a boost. Just get your promotion and ride off into the sunset, someone else will deal with the aftermath.
    - potato3732842 2y ago
      It's not just about incentives. It's about selecting for the kind of people who succeed under those incentive structures. Even if you're hiring a cross section of the population or a cross section of software developers or management professionals only a slice of it is gonna stick around long enough to influence the organization. For example, you don't find a lot of Ron Swanson types working for insurance, the court system, or health and safety. Those personality types are either gonna find a new job, turn into a bitter shell of a person counting the days to retirement or go postal and finding a new job is obviously the superior option. The comparison between Google and Microsoft (or whatever) is gonna be similar though the differences will be more nuanced. Same thing for big banks. Same for big oil. Same for big anything. You've got these differing corporate cultures and incentive sets and they select for different people.
    - snoman 2y ago
      At Microsoft, for every Principal Engineer/Manager there’s a dead internal project that nobody uses but had “… lots of impact.”
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    Microsoft is built on completely different ethos and evolved from there. (I think it was Paul Allen is who said it) "Microsoft is a corporation built upon the idea of intellectual property". So being closed source, aggressive safeguarding of IP and locking users in is the DNA of Microsoft. Yes, company is made of people, but there's also a foundational DNA. When you keep that DNA alive, the company changes and eats the people fed into it, without evolving (See Apple, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.). Google's DNA has been changed from the top from a powerful but gentle giant to subtle but very evil giant.
- windex 2y ago
  >Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this? Management by committees. Lots of office politics. Most senior execs have successfully failed upwards. Once every 18 months they let go of people they stick the blame on thereby losing any memory of design decisions.
  - 3vidence 2y ago
    I feel like I'm currently experiencing failing upwards. I had a kid recently and have been putting less into my work, mostly just pushing back on asks and delegating because I don't have time. All of a sudden I have senior management potential haha. Feels like I'm living in the movie office space
- addicted 2y ago
  Skype for Business, which was really just a rebranding of Microsoft Lync, destroyed the Skype brand. But it also indirectly damaged both variations. Skype for Business became less of a “business” software like Lync was. So unlike Lync, which was fairly spartan but information dense, Skype for Business added a ton of white space, colors, icons, etc making it less efficient and less serious than Lync. At the same time, Skype itself became purely consumer and went way down that route, focusing more on Temu like animation gimmicks than actually being a communication tool for friends and families.
- htrp 2y ago
  > Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it? Yes. rivalry is at it's finest (and fiercest) when you're fighting your peer divisions inside the same company.
- tracker1 2y ago
  Microsoft had MANY opportunities for this, Google as well for that matter. Especially if you consider Instant Messenger clients. I absolutely loved Google Hangouts when it was the all in one solution (including GV and SMS integration on the phone). MS(N) Messenger could have been very close as well a couple times. It's the management decisions to try to dramatically change or replace things that lands with lesser solutions in the end. Because the incentives and bonus structure are mostly screwed up in many of these companies. Skype could have been the best, be all, end all solution for MS and brought everyone to their knees and just killed them. But it wasn't the first, or last time this would happen.
nickdothutton 2y ago
Easier to monitor if centralised.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  Yes, everyone and their Windows installs and their _NSAKEY guessed the reason was that.
tombert 2y ago
> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before. Maybe; I think people forget how horrible Skype was on your phone battery when it was still P2P. The P2P-ness of it was definitely pretty cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the decreased battery. > It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much. Honestly I've been using Skype to talk to my parents ever since I moved out of my parents place in 2012, and for the last decade or so, it's been perfectly fine. I know it's kind of a meme to hate on it, but it never really was an issue for me.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
I think they killed it when they migrated user login to a Microsoft accounts that nobody used or wanted. For me at least, it made Skype with synonymous with trying to figure out the email and doing a password reset
Lammy 2y ago
> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before. Story in two headlines: - “NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution” https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f... (2009) - “Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?” https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ (2011)
- qingcharles 2y ago
  Well, the better ask is why eBay bought it...
  - Scoundreller 2y ago
    And even when eBay thought they bought it, apparently they didn’t buy all of it: https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/06/ebay_skype/ https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/06/ebay_skype/ https://www.hugheshubbard.com/news/the-best-laid-m-a-plans-how-a-dispute-over-ownership-of-critical-ip-may-threaten-ebays-sale-of-skype https://www.hugheshubbard.com/news/the-best-laid-m-a-plans-h...
    - hedgehog 2y ago
      Oh it gets better. Apparently some of the stuff they didn't get dated back to Kazaa. Some of the Skype founders were under indictment and traveling incognito while they raised money for the new company.
      - pests 2y ago
        I had interacted with Pritt Kasesalu (PrittK) when I was very young. In the late 90/early 00s I played an MMO developed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) named Subspace, released in the mid 90s. It was a top down astroids-like space game with maps of up to 100 or more players, even back then. The game shut down officially but the server leaked and became community ran. The original client was not very secure so hacking and cheating became common. Out of nowhere comes Continuum, a ground up reimplementation of the Subspace client by none other than PrittK, completely eliminating any cheats but changing nothing of gameplay or UI. He went on to co-own the largest server, Trench Wars, with another player named Dock. There he did custom game bots and other chat-tools. There were rumors that he was involved with Kazaa back then and later on I find out he goes on to be involved with Skype and Joost. Continuum continued to grow and thrive. The backend server was eventually reimplemented into A Small Subspace Server (ASSS) so now this game was a complete user recreation of the original. Well, minus the graphics which was in limbo from some sale to a third party company but they never had complaints. Then a few years ago we grt the game green lit on steam. Little trek down memory lane. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game) https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530450/Continuum/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530450/Continuum/
sznio 2y ago
Part of it was that performance was abysmal. Everyone jumped to Discord (an electron app!) when it released, because it performed better.
- theultdev 2y ago
  From the circles I was in, everyone jumped from Skype / Mumble / Teamspeak because of D/DoS attacks after having their ip exposed. It happened all the time because booters were so popular and widely available, costing about $5/mo via paypal. People were willing to put up with more delay (over p2p) to prevent having to trust each person that joins the TS. Skype transitioned away from p2p because mobile phones were not very powerful and they needed a lot of supernodes. First desktop apps were the supernodes, then it turned into centralized servers entirely.
  - Nullabillity 2y ago
    Mumble was never P2P.
mihaaly 2y ago
I think they killed it by making it unusable through forcing dubious UI/UX/design-principle/other-bs trends for no compelling reason at all on a perfectly good interface.
DrFalkyn 2y ago
Sadly this is the culture now at tech companies. All the data has to go through company servers, whether it makes technical sense or not Pretty sure I flunked a system design question this reason. I was asked to design an online chat system. I asked of they wanted support for groups, they said no. So I gave them simple two way socket solution. Apparently that wasn’t good enough, They wanted a full DB storing everyone’s conversations, that you could query, etc. I suspected it had nothing to do with any technical considerations. They just wanted that data.
- pests 2y ago
  Did they want multi device? How do you sync messages? History?
  - DrFalkyn 2y ago
    You can sync with timestamps History can be stored locally Centralizing this just seems way more complicated to me, unless you want groups. Even then for small groups P2P isn’t such a terrible idea Not sure what you mean by multidevice, I do t think they cared about mobile
- niutech 2y ago
  There are also Jami and Tox as decentralized Slack alternatives.
  - johnisgood 2y ago
    Or Mattermost, Zulip, or... Briar, among others. :P
    - niutech 2y ago
      Mattermost and Zulip aren't decentralized.
      - johnisgood 2y ago
tomjen3 2y ago
Skype was born in a world of laptops and either wireless or otherwise unmetered internet. You can have a P2P system there. In a world where the primary interface is a mobile phone, you can't just run a piece of software on a mobile phone. If you do that Skype will just be known as the app that completely destroys your battery randomly and for no seeming reason.
giancarlostoro 2y ago
Smartphones killed Skypes strong P2P presence.

OvbiousError 2y ago

Almost everything I do for work uses teams, so I can't say MS missed any boats. It's spectacular how pervasive teams is given how universally reviled it is. I'd personally switch back to slack in a heartbeat for instance.

l33tman 2y ago
Don't know about Slack's videoconf, but Slack's cheap insistence that we pay a rip-off amount of money per month for storing some TEXT messages more than 90 days has continuously degraded my appreciation for it over the last years to the level of me hating it now. They're so cheap. Just put a quota on total storage or something, that actually map to their costs.. We have a Slack for a shared office of 10 people or so, we use it to like ask each other for where to go for lunch or general stuff, it must cost them $0.001/month to host, but you continuously get a banner that says PAY TO UNLOCK THESE EXCITING OLD MESSAGES all over it, and when you check what they want, they want some exorbitant amount like $10/month/user so $100/month for a lunch-synchronization tool. For $100/month I can store like 5 TB on S3, that's a lot of texts. I'm genuinely curious why they don't have some other payment option, I'd be happy to pay $1/month/user for some basic level if they just don't want freeloaders there. Well, I wouldn't be happy.. but still :)
- OskarS 2y ago
  Slack is primarily a business tool, and for a business tool $10/user/month is extremely reasonable for the value (perceived or real) it brings. The company has to make money, and you do that by charging for your products and services, and that price is not exorbitant.
  - SR2Z 2y ago
    The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the retention to 1yr. Nothing is as frustrating as looking for an old conversation referenced in a doc and being smugly told by some corporate dick that Slack isn't for documentation and if it were important info, clearly someone should have saved it. Never mind who, it should just magically happen. The gap between "messages last for 30 days" and "Slack keeps a searchable record of all your business decisions in a useful way, forever" is huge. I can pretty easily see the value of the latter but it seems to freak executives out for some reason...

7bit 2y ago

What? Teams was and is everywhere. The opportunity was taken so hard, the EU ruled that Teams must be decoupled from the Office Suite and Windows because it was near impossible to not have or use Teams. All that happened because and during the pandemic.

kaon_ 2y ago

This. In German the word for "video-calling" is "Skyping". Similar to MSN, the strength of the brand and goodwill that it has in some geographies is on-par with Google for search, or Coca Cola for coke. The fact that the software got consistently worse, year on year on year is hard to grasp for me. Microsoft made the right call to cannibalize and use teams. But how was Skype such a pain? Not being able to share screenshots in chat killed it for me.

harvey9 2y ago
Coke is a trademark owned by Coca-Cola - the generic word is cola. Their brand is so strong that even though you were thinking about the topic of branding they still got you!
- jimmydddd 2y ago
  "Yes, in many parts of Europe, people commonly use the word "coke" as a generic term for soda, similar to how it is used in the American South, essentially referring to any type of cola beverage rather than just the Coca-Cola brand; this is because Coca-Cola is so widely recognized across the continent." --Google's ai thing
  - eythian 2y ago
    Interesting, where I lived (NZ), "coke" was the typical term for Coca-Cola (not generic soda, but you may be asked if Pepsi is OK), however in NL where I live now it's pretty universally "cola", and I think that's also not generic. Can't speak to other European countries though, I've never noticed.
    - macintux 2y ago
      In the U.S., it tends to be a regional thing. Coke, soda, pop are all in common use as the general term for soft drinks.
    - arp242 2y ago
      I'd use "cola" in Dutch to refer to the generic type of drink, which is pretty much universal in Dutch AFAIK. But I would use "coke" in English. I'm not sure where I picked that up: I've lived in a combination of England/Ireland/NZ over many years, and to be honest I'm not actually sure how it's used there. Maybe just from US films? Although what I really wanted was a Pepsi, but she wouldn't give it to me. All I wanted was a Pepsi! AND SHE WOULDN'T GIVE IT TO ME!

high_na_euv 2y ago

Missed? They grew Teams, lol. Zoom - wtf, who the hell uses it after. Discord would be better example since it is huge, even LLVM community uses it

Cthulhu_ 2y ago
I suspect quite a few people still use Zoom out of habit / procedure, but you can see on its stock market value that it really was a pandemic success, its stock market dropped and flattened out after 2022.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Now that I'm not at a company that uses Google Workplace, Zoom is far and away the most common video chat I see--but with a few exceptions, I think it's pretty much all just personal accounts.
mrintegrity 2y ago
Discord missed an opportunity to become the video calling and chat king, the smoothness of joining and leaving a group video chat when you please and the high quality video, audio and app support was exactly the kind of "just like being in the office but virtual" experience that teams, skype, slack, zoom, meet, etc lack. During peak covid it was a godsend having calls with friends and playing games together. My dream service would be very like discord but with scheduled meeting support and completely open source and self hostable.
- bloomingkales 2y ago
  Gaming laptops today are the best AI laptops. They will never sell as well to the masses because they have a gaming aesthetic. This is true for Discord as well. Skinning HN like it's Facebook will turn you off, even if it has the content you want believe it or not.
  - mook 2y ago
    Quite a few gaming laptops these days have slightly more subdued aesthetics. Unfortunately they're still huge due to cooling requirements (or rather, because that's a dimension that can be sacrificed without too much trouble) though.

mrkramer 2y ago

>The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic They missed the huge opportunity way before on mobile and in gaming, that's when WhatsApp and Discord stepped in and destroyed Skype.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

goodmachine 2y ago

A message from the Skype CEO [NSFW] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E

qingcharles 2y ago
That was great :)

cynicalsecurity 2y ago

Big corporations are usually super slow and clumsy in implementing anything new or doing any quick changes.

ycuser2 2y ago
MS was very quick with implementing LLMs everywhere.

Clubber 2y ago

I believe they rolled the Skype technology into MS Teams and made teams their dominant video platform. MS Teams is pretty widely used based on all the complaints I hear about it. I didn't even realize Skype was still an option.

osigurdson 2y ago

Teams is used quite a bit.

ffsm8 2y ago

huh? Microsoft massively leverage their market position and spread their teams application like the plague! They just decided they like teams more then skype

randerson 2y ago

Skype should be a textbook case of how a product team will keep inventing new projects to justify their continued employment, even if it means messing with a winning formula. Skype achieved perfection a year or two after the Microsoft acquisition. At that point they should have downsized the team and focused on maintenance. Instead, they kept releasing new versions, each new version being worse than the previous one.

novia 2y ago
Skype was perfect BEFORE the Microsoft acquisition. Everything afterwards was unnecessary. Source: I used Skype before and after 2011.
- alternatex 2y ago
  Group calls weren't perfect. P2P doesn't lend itself well to group calls.
ryandrake 2y ago
Wasn't the whole point of O.G. Skype that it was entirely peer to peer, and did not require a central service? Then, once Microsoft bought it, the first thing they did was ditch that and make it require centralized servers? IMO peak Skype was right before it was bought. Agreed though, every time Microsoft touched it, they made it worse. But many (most?) software is like that now. I dread new releases, because everyone makes software worse now.
- genewitch 2y ago
  msmsgs.exe was p2p. Came with Windows 98, possibly 95. Video, audio, text. Maybe microsoft forgot they made that?
- codedokode 2y ago
  The selling point of original Skype was that it allowed making audio calls on worst connections, requiring just several kilobytes/sec, and going through NATs (other products required a direct fast connection and were usable only within a local network). As for P2P, I don't think users care about that. Not having P2P is actually better because P2P can disclose your IP address. For example, Tox is a fully decentralized P2P messenger and it is not widely popular.

Izikiel43 2y ago

Microsoft didn’t miss their opportunity with COVID, teams user base grew by the millions

tracker1 2y ago
The anti-trust reactions may undo a lot of that, that already hasn't been undone. I know too many orgs that hate Teams and just want to stick to slack, etc. Personally, I don't really love any of them... I miss the simpler UI/UX of Instant Messenger apps or Trillian/Pidgin etc. Aside, just looked at Trillian and looks like they did a nice spin on their business model.

StableAlkyne 2y ago

Some suit was probably worried about cannibalizing their Teams business (even though Skype has better name recognition and Teams has a bad reputation). It's pretty common in the dinosaurs like Microsoft. Kodak for example had working digital cameras very early on, but didn't do anything with them because they didn't want to cannibalize their film business. Give a suit a KPI, and they're gonna optimize for that KPI.

TylerE 2y ago
Remember, Teams was originally "Skype for Business".
- GrzegorzWidla 2y ago
  Originally it was Office Communicator, then Lync, then Skype for Business and now Teams.
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
Digital cameras were mostly useless in the 80s and early 90s for rank and file consumers. The demand wasn't there.
rchaud 2y ago
Kodak doesn't make lenses or camera hardware, so it's possible they didn't pursue digital cameras because they'd be immediately out-competed by Sony, Canon and Nikon.

acd10j 2y ago

What are you talking about? Microsoft Teams took over everything else during and after the pandemic. The reason for Skype being left behind was that everyone started using Teams in enterprises.

arp242 2y ago

When my then-girlfriend went off to study in a different country about 10 years ago, Skype was the only video call solution I was able to get working between our OS X and Linux laptops. Generally worked fairly well, too. Since then, I had forgotten it even existed: "Microsoft is killing Skype? Wasn't it dead yet?"

tshaddox 2y ago

Didn't Microsoft Teams soundly defeat Zoom, Slack, and all the others? I was under the impression that Teams has at least an order of magnitude more active users than any competitor.

soundnote 2y ago
It does, but Teams is mostly a thing within businesses. Skype is a consumer side brand, which MS is scuttling in favour of Teams (which is a really weird brand to try to use for consumer-side customers). They could've used Teams architecture/app and branded it as Skype, it would've made way more sense than Teams (free) which is what they're doing now. Consumer side Microsoft Accounts and business are different worlds, it'd help MS a lot to speak about them clearly. But MS and good product naming, well...
petepete 2y ago
Teams has more users but most of those users didn't choose Teams - it was thrust upon them. When it's bundled with O365 and shares admin tools, accounts etc, there's no wonder companies pick it. I don't know anyone who uses it outside of work.
- tracker1 2y ago
  I tried for a bit.. it really sucks outside the work context, and much like when there were too many competing IM products, it just doesn't work without all the people. Wasn't too bad when most were under ICQ, AIM or Yahoo messenger... but after FB, Google and MS got in the mix it just went to hell mostly. Still is. I mean I have half a dozen messenger apps on my phone each with half a dozen contacts that thing $FOO messenger is better for privacy/comms/etc.

FuriouslyAdrift 2y ago

Teams (which includes the guts of Lync... aka Skype For Business) has grown into Microsoft's behemoth (320 million active daily users while Zoom only has 200k business customers and actually declined YoY). If you are talking non-business free users then sure, Zoom comes out on top.

booleandilemma 2y ago
Doesn't Microsoft install it on every windows laptop automatically? Are they all "users"?
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  Active daily users. Any company with Office suite (which is basically any behemoth in every single country) just uses Teams, instead of paying up for Slack.

486sx33 2y ago

It also , at least for people in some circles, doesn’t have the negative connotations that Teams does. I’m more apt to agree to a Skype type setting than someone saying let’s setup a teams meet or I’ll message you on teams. I am aware a Skype meeting and a teams meeting is essentially the same thing now, it’s just a bias in my mind.

dwedge 2y ago

During covid I asked if I could switch my monthly Skype number to annual and they said the only way is to cancel and resubscribe, with a new phone number. It was clear they didn't care even back then.

kernal 2y ago

> The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling IMO this hasn’t been true since 2020.

endofreach 2y ago

It's just insane how this is a pattern with microsoft. That should be studied. It's not meant snarky. I am really fascinated. I dislike microsoft but feel that my bias is taking over whenever i get to say things like "of course it failed– it's microsoft". But it is also true every time. Somehow microsoft has a unique talent to take things and just find ways to screw it up in ways, people couldn't imagine. That is really, really fascinating. But, of course: thank god they blow it every time. They bring the spotlight to the places where others create good things.