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Skype is the epitome of technical debt. Millions of lines of code for a service that isn't technically difficult to provide anymore. When I was at Microsoft, I

Skype is the epitome of technical debt. Millions of lines of code for a service that isn't technically difficult to provide anymore. When I was at Microsoft, I was told working on Skype was about as popular as being sent to a gulag. The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.

Someone 2y ago
“Skype for Business” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business) sort-of was that. It put the “Skype” brand on “Lync”, which was a rebranded “Office Communicator” (IIRC, there were some technical changes along the line, too, but I may misremember that) It got replaced by Teams.
- legitster 2y ago
  And Skype had to maintain compatibility with many of these services that came and went.
iLoveOncall 2y ago
> The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version I am not. The brand is strong in a negative way, I have never met anyone who ever liked Skype.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Then my guess is you're not old enough to have used it much when it first came out. Because at that time, it wasn't really competing with other internet calling services, it was competing with international phone rates that were dollars a minute. In some cases it actually made long distance relationships viable that otherwise weren't.
- manuelabeledo 2y ago
  I have. Skype was very popular in many places around the world.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
This Joel on Software blog post is now 25 years old, https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-..., but when it first came out it was widely viewed as gospel. I'm generally a big fan of Joel Spolsky, but in retrospect, I think this advice is just wrong, and I think Skype is a perfect counterpoint. That is, sometimes a rewrite is a horrible idea, but at the same time sometimes not doing a rewrite is a horrible idea. If making changes to the code becomes such a nightmare that your rate of progress is much less than your competitors, you're going to lose. While there is still some good advice in that blog post, hard-and-fast rules are rarely correct. Most things in engineering are tradeoffs, and it's tough to know sometimes what the right balance is.
- zero_shift 2y ago
  Sometimes the technology "background" changes so much that the codebase you have just becomes irrelevant. We live in a world with WebRTC, embedded agents and digital telephony. The platforms, OSes, infrastructure are so different from how they were in 2009. Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more? What I don't get is how MS couldn't use the Teams stack to power Skype as a consumer brand. Probably there was some effort but something got in the way. It might even have been a cultural barrier - Skype was an acquisition, and acquired codebases generally fossilise
  - esafak 2y ago
    So the answer can change over time. You have to periodically re-assess the benefits of a rewrite.
  - niutech 2y ago
    > Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more? Yes, if it is less bloated than Electron-based. See Jami, which is a native app and it's distributed and open source.
- codedokode 2y ago
  Skype probably was rewritten multiple times - C++ client was replaced with Electron, and server API was broken many times as well. The reason Microsoft shuts down Skype is not because there is too much technical debt but because there are few paying customers and because there are new messengers like Telegram.
pif 2y ago
> I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails. I'm surprised that you are surprised! Rewriting a million-lines-of-code project from scratch without the stupid bits is easy. Getting the equivalent of the working bits, instead... Joel expressed this concept quite well already 25 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
- paulddraper 2y ago
  Skype is 20 years old. Tech has advanced enormously in that time.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Funnily enough, I put that blog post in a sibling comment and described why I think it's bad advice. Why don't you think Skype is a perfect counterpoint to Joel's argument? I mean, Skype basically died because they didn't throw it away and start from scratch. Like the parent comment said, competitors came up, and what used to be a million line giant project was about a bajillion times easier when WhatsApp came along. Yes, it's absolutely true getting the working bits correct is hard, by consigning yourself to a slow death doesn't seem like much of an improvement.
theyknowitsxmas 2y ago
Sell the brand to Signal
TiredOfLife 2y ago
They did launch a from scratch electron crap at least once. That version didn't migrate settings/account. Had to help at least 3 different people who suddenly lost access to their contacts.
pentagrama 2y ago
The 2.0 version of Skype is Microsoft Teams, and they built it from scratch. Along with the Skype code, the Skype brand was also thrown in the trash. You could question that decision—perhaps keeping both brands for different target demographics would have been a better move. Teams could be for work and business, while Skype (powered by Teams' code) could remain for regular consumers. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s better to strengthen a single brand rather than maintain two separate products. That said, I do have an issue with the name Teams—it doesn’t quite fit the use case of calling your grandma overseas.
- legitster 2y ago
  Teams also has a lot of technical debt in it's own given that they essentially combined Yammer with Sharepoint and Office to make it!
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Thanks, that's a good point that makes the most sense to me - MS didn't rewrite it because they essentially didn't need to, they already had something else. Totally agree about the brand fumble. I think Teams is the least known/used brand by consumers, but honestly maybe these days that really doesn't matter that much from a money-making perspective.
- soundnote 2y ago
  Yeah, the consumer side Teams app is already different in UX than the corporate one. Wouldn't have been terribly difficult to brand that as Skype and market it as such.
- hulitu 2y ago
  > and they built it from scratch. They are still building on it. For some reason, noone at Microsoft has any idea how the final product shall look like, so they are changing the UI/UX every couple of months.
lxgr 2y ago
Launching a Skype 2.0 incompatible with 1.0 clients/users would be a quick way to completely ruin said brand value. Of course, as we see here, not doing anything had the same effect in the end...
jrcplus 2y ago
I worked at Skype from eBay to Microsoft. The clients were rewritten, sometimes from scratch, sometimes redesigned to chase after the latest UI trend. But rewriting clients didn't address the fact that the OG widely successful Skype was fundamentally peer-to-peer. There were no servers, only supernodes. After smartphones took off, management was reluctant to ditch P2P and move to a client-server model, for both business (running servers costs money, and remember Skype mostly made money on calling PSTN) and technical reasons (P2P was at the heart of Skype). Internally, engineers had Skype working "in the cloud", but it took years of waffling (middle management was distracted by the introduction of Scrum; don't get me started about that; upper management was distracted by the company getting bought and sold twice) before slowly turning around the big ship. By then, the A/V part of the tech had become commoditized, and plenty of free alternatives (namely FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat) had appeared on the scene, with better business models. No amount of rewriting code and building from scratch addressed that latter part. Management was very interested in finding new ways of making money, but it was also (for better or worse) very reluctant and careful in introducing ads into the UI.
- niutech 2y ago
  Why not open source Skype then?

Someone 2y ago

“Skype for Business” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business) sort-of was that. It put the “Skype” brand on “Lync”, which was a rebranded “Office Communicator” (IIRC, there were some technical changes along the line, too, but I may misremember that) It got replaced by Teams.

legitster 2y ago
And Skype had to maintain compatibility with many of these services that came and went.

iLoveOncall 2y ago

> The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version I am not. The brand is strong in a negative way, I have never met anyone who ever liked Skype.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Then my guess is you're not old enough to have used it much when it first came out. Because at that time, it wasn't really competing with other internet calling services, it was competing with international phone rates that were dollars a minute. In some cases it actually made long distance relationships viable that otherwise weren't.
manuelabeledo 2y ago
I have. Skype was very popular in many places around the world.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

This Joel on Software blog post is now 25 years old, https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-..., but when it first came out it was widely viewed as gospel. I'm generally a big fan of Joel Spolsky, but in retrospect, I think this advice is just wrong, and I think Skype is a perfect counterpoint. That is, sometimes a rewrite is a horrible idea, but at the same time sometimes not doing a rewrite is a horrible idea. If making changes to the code becomes such a nightmare that your rate of progress is much less than your competitors, you're going to lose. While there is still some good advice in that blog post, hard-and-fast rules are rarely correct. Most things in engineering are tradeoffs, and it's tough to know sometimes what the right balance is.

zero_shift 2y ago
Sometimes the technology "background" changes so much that the codebase you have just becomes irrelevant. We live in a world with WebRTC, embedded agents and digital telephony. The platforms, OSes, infrastructure are so different from how they were in 2009. Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more? What I don't get is how MS couldn't use the Teams stack to power Skype as a consumer brand. Probably there was some effort but something got in the way. It might even have been a cultural barrier - Skype was an acquisition, and acquired codebases generally fossilise
- esafak 2y ago
  So the answer can change over time. You have to periodically re-assess the benefits of a rewrite.
- niutech 2y ago
  > Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more? Yes, if it is less bloated than Electron-based. See Jami, which is a native app and it's distributed and open source.
codedokode 2y ago
Skype probably was rewritten multiple times - C++ client was replaced with Electron, and server API was broken many times as well. The reason Microsoft shuts down Skype is not because there is too much technical debt but because there are few paying customers and because there are new messengers like Telegram.

pif 2y ago

> I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails. I'm surprised that you are surprised! Rewriting a million-lines-of-code project from scratch without the stupid bits is easy. Getting the equivalent of the working bits, instead... Joel expressed this concept quite well already 25 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-never-do-part-i/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

paulddraper 2y ago
Skype is 20 years old. Tech has advanced enormously in that time.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Funnily enough, I put that blog post in a sibling comment and described why I think it's bad advice. Why don't you think Skype is a perfect counterpoint to Joel's argument? I mean, Skype basically died because they didn't throw it away and start from scratch. Like the parent comment said, competitors came up, and what used to be a million line giant project was about a bajillion times easier when WhatsApp came along. Yes, it's absolutely true getting the working bits correct is hard, by consigning yourself to a slow death doesn't seem like much of an improvement.

theyknowitsxmas 2y ago

Sell the brand to Signal

TiredOfLife 2y ago

They did launch a from scratch electron crap at least once. That version didn't migrate settings/account. Had to help at least 3 different people who suddenly lost access to their contacts.

pentagrama 2y ago

The 2.0 version of Skype is Microsoft Teams, and they built it from scratch. Along with the Skype code, the Skype brand was also thrown in the trash. You could question that decision—perhaps keeping both brands for different target demographics would have been a better move. Teams could be for work and business, while Skype (powered by Teams' code) could remain for regular consumers. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s better to strengthen a single brand rather than maintain two separate products. That said, I do have an issue with the name Teams—it doesn’t quite fit the use case of calling your grandma overseas.

legitster 2y ago
Teams also has a lot of technical debt in it's own given that they essentially combined Yammer with Sharepoint and Office to make it!
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Thanks, that's a good point that makes the most sense to me - MS didn't rewrite it because they essentially didn't need to, they already had something else. Totally agree about the brand fumble. I think Teams is the least known/used brand by consumers, but honestly maybe these days that really doesn't matter that much from a money-making perspective.
soundnote 2y ago
Yeah, the consumer side Teams app is already different in UX than the corporate one. Wouldn't have been terribly difficult to brand that as Skype and market it as such.
hulitu 2y ago
> and they built it from scratch. They are still building on it. For some reason, noone at Microsoft has any idea how the final product shall look like, so they are changing the UI/UX every couple of months.

lxgr 2y ago

Launching a Skype 2.0 incompatible with 1.0 clients/users would be a quick way to completely ruin said brand value. Of course, as we see here, not doing anything had the same effect in the end...

jrcplus 2y ago

I worked at Skype from eBay to Microsoft. The clients were rewritten, sometimes from scratch, sometimes redesigned to chase after the latest UI trend. But rewriting clients didn't address the fact that the OG widely successful Skype was fundamentally peer-to-peer. There were no servers, only supernodes. After smartphones took off, management was reluctant to ditch P2P and move to a client-server model, for both business (running servers costs money, and remember Skype mostly made money on calling PSTN) and technical reasons (P2P was at the heart of Skype). Internally, engineers had Skype working "in the cloud", but it took years of waffling (middle management was distracted by the introduction of Scrum; don't get me started about that; upper management was distracted by the company getting bought and sold twice) before slowly turning around the big ship. By then, the A/V part of the tech had become commoditized, and plenty of free alternatives (namely FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat) had appeared on the scene, with better business models. No amount of rewriting code and building from scratch addressed that latter part. Management was very interested in finding new ways of making money, but it was also (for better or worse) very reluctant and careful in introducing ads into the UI.

niutech 2y ago
Why not open source Skype then?