8 ms·

I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2

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.

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.