[HN Gopher] Microsoft is killing Skype
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft is killing Skype
Author : thund
Score : 524 points
Date : 2025-02-28 05:31 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.windowscentral.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.windowscentral.com)
| thund wrote:
| If true this will be another "we lost the browser war" "we
| underestimated mobile" story, and they will realize it only 10
| years from now.
| ddingus wrote:
| I really like Skype and have a ton of important contacts on it.
|
| Everyone is pissed, in our circles at least.
|
| I dislike Teams for ad hoc comms.
|
| We will have to pick something..
|
| Not looking forward to that.
|
| SKYPE suddenly HAS TO HAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER.
|
| Getting Microsoft accounts has to be why.
|
| Nope. We will pick something else.
| a_bonobo wrote:
| It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid. They
| already had everyone and everything in place! But the app is a
| buggy mess, far worse than Teams, and they just refused to do
| anything about it.
|
| I guess MS-internal politics? They had their own Teams and that
| was the preferred product?
| notTooFarGone wrote:
| The codebase is reportedly the biggest mess and impossible to
| navigate. In that light is just crystal clear why you would
| want to reinvent the wheel.
| ratg13 wrote:
| They've rebuilt popular software many times over in the past.
|
| Even with Skype they rebuilt the entire backend as well when
| they moved it from a decentralized platform to a centralized
| platform.
|
| I struggle to believe that this theory holds any water.
|
| It also lends support to an old conspiracy theory that the
| primary driver for Microsoft buying Skype was so that the
| service could be centralized so that communications could be
| monitored and intercepted.
| rhubarbtree wrote:
| > They've rebuilt popular software many times over in the
| past.
|
| Ironically, I think this list includes Teams.
| dijit wrote:
| The calling functionality of Teams seems to be based on
| skype.
|
| (if strings, binary layout and even some subprocess names
| are to be believed)
| EionRobb wrote:
| Can confirm, as a Teams and Skype protocol reverse
| engineerer for Pidgin, that most of the Teams protocol
| including text messages started as Skype (not the
| decentralised one) and has had additional layers of stuff
| added over the years on top. The calling for both Skype
| and Teams still uses a websocket with a "reverse webhook"
| called Trouter, which lets the client respond to events
| as if it were a webserver responding to webhooks, and
| then does a handoff to WebRTC. When I first started
| writing the Teams protocol plugin for libpurple, it was
| easier to start with the Skype plugin than to start from
| scratch.
| boznz wrote:
| they had to rebuild it, original Skype was written in
| delphi
| WalterBright wrote:
| > they just refused to do anything about it
|
| Whenever I reboot my computer, Skype installs an update.
| Espressosaurus wrote:
| It was 100% the preferred product. AFAIK Skype was deprecated
| internally well before COVID.
| pjmlp wrote:
| If it was only Skype, Windows development has turned into a
| mess, it appears teams are filled with newly grads, without any
| background on Windows development, or Windows developer
| culture.
|
| That is why there are now Webview2 usage all over the place,
| and after 5 years WinUI 3.0 is still behind the WinForms, WPF
| and even MFC development experience, even though it should have
| been a plain port of UWP/WinUI 2.0 into standard Win32
| infrastructure, so adding almost another 10 years on top (WinRT
| platform came out in 2012).
|
| EDIT: it was actually 2012, not 2014.
| kennysoona wrote:
| This is why they tried to remake the Windows interface to be
| more Mac like as well. What a disgrace.
| DanielHB wrote:
| I imagine internally they have a hard time staffing the Teams
| project. Like VSCode is a WebView2 project but it is miles
| ahead of Teams in quality. At least on the client side
| features seems far more complex too.
|
| Teams used to use Angular 1 and I think they are still
| migrating out of it. Microsoft would need to pay me a lot of
| money to want to dive into that mess. I imagine there are a
| lot of devs who would love to be VSCode core developers
| though.
| pjmlp wrote:
| It was also React Electron for a while, but that isn't the
| only issue with Teams, even if we comparing them running as
| pure Web application across browser tabs, Teams, Slack,
| Discord,.....
|
| I really don't know what the Teams team does all day long.
| DanielHB wrote:
| Dealing with old crappy codebases can really tank a
| product, especially if you don't have management support
| to fix the broken practices.
|
| I imagine the Teams project gets a lot of pressure to
| deliver features instead of fixing the underlying
| problems. While the VSCode project probably only
| occasionally gets a push from upper management (like to
| add copilot stuff)
|
| Delivering features on top of an unmaintainable mess just
| makes the mess bigger.
| NoLinkToMe wrote:
| > It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid.
|
| Afaik Skype was a buggy mess and thereby not a good foundation
| for development, and very much had a reputation of being
| software for consumers, not businesses, so not a good
| foundation to make money.
|
| Microsoft meanwhile is a corporate powerhouse, not a consumer
| powerhouse. Most of its profits are from corporate software and
| servers.
|
| So it made sense that they developed MS Teams as a corporate
| product for their Office product range.
|
| It's closing in on half a billion users and its annual (!)
| revenue already exceeds the purchase price of Skype. 90% of
| fortune 100 companies use it, and I think it's the go-to
| product for virtually all corporates that run on PC/Windows.
|
| Not doing this sooner (14 years ago) is where they definitely
| dropped the ball. But during covid? I think MS completely
| nailed it with a hugely succesful rollout of an integrated tech
| in MS Teams.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| Oh no! Anyway... Signal seems fine as a replacement?
| bamboozled wrote:
| Can you make landline calls internationally with it for cheap ?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| No, Signal is compromized. Set up your Matrix server.
| amedvednikov wrote:
| How is it compromised?
| davidgerard wrote:
| that's a troll
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Signal is centralized, i.e. has a CEO and a bank account.
| Secondly, it is US based.
| mc3301 wrote:
| The verb "to skype" means "to video chat with someone" to many
| many people, in the same way "to google" means to look something
| up online.
|
| I don't even use skype, yet I say "I skyped my grandma on Sunday"
| and similar, using any number of other apps. It'll be a hard
| habit to break.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| I suggest continuing to use it. Your language habits are not
| the property of marketers and product managers.
|
| Now someday nobody will recognize the name and your meaning
| will no longer be clear. But until then Skype away, and use
| bandaids and Kleenex while you do it.
| AnonC wrote:
| Tangential: I have a U.S. Skype Number (i.e., a real phone number
| offered by the Skype service) that's mainly used to receive and
| make (occasional) calls from/to a bank and to receive SMS
| occasionally. The cost is about $40 a year. With Skype Number not
| available for purchase since December and the Skype platform
| (including Skype Number) going away soon, what are some simple,
| good (and preferably cheaper) alternatives for a VoIP service
| that works on an iPhone? I do not have any (other) real phone
| number in the U.S. I guess my current Skype Number cannot be
| ported or moved to another service.
|
| Are there any alternatives to get a real U.S. phone number that
| will work in another country for long periods (AFAIK, many
| providers require the phone to connect to a local cellular
| network periodically)?
|
| Edit: In case it wasn't apparent, I'm not physically in the U.S.
| jraph wrote:
| It seems what you are looking for is a SIP provider. There are
| many. Some of them allow interconnection with the "real" phone
| network.
| rwmj wrote:
| If only SIP wasn't such a trashfire of non-interoperating
| impossible to configure garbage.
| stampedbox wrote:
| google fi
| jszymborski wrote:
| VoIP.ms
| samsk wrote:
| Try zadarma.com I've multiple numbers there
| freetime2 wrote:
| Any issue receiving SMS messages with zadarma? In the past I
| have banks block numbers that come from VoIP providers.
| samsk wrote:
| Yes, there is still a problem there. Some 'clever' services
| are blocking probably all VOIP numbers, not only zadarma.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I was using Google Voice for a while, which is nice because it
| is free and never had any issues receiving SMS. A US phone
| number is required to activate, so I used a US relative's phone
| number to activate and then just disabled all the forwarding
| features so calls and SMS would never be forwarded to that
| number.
|
| Unfortunately, I went so long without actually using it that
| they took my number away (my fault because they did send me a
| warning but I just forgot about it). Now I'm in the same boat
| as you as I had switched to a Skype Number after that.
|
| But Google Voice is a decent free option to consider if there's
| someone in the US who could help you with initial activation.
| Until Google finally decides to kill it, at least. I'm frankly
| surprised that Microsoft killed Skype before Google killed
| Voice.
| AnonC wrote:
| GP here: I had the exact same experience with Google Voice
| (linked to my Skype Number several years ago). Sadly, I could
| never get it to work with another Skype Number again.
| chneu wrote:
| I've been using Gvoice pretty much since it started. I'm just
| as surprised as you that Google hasnt killed it. The writing
| has seemed to be on the wall a few times but it's still
| around, thankfully.
|
| When they semi-killed hangouts a couple years ago I thought
| for sure Gvoice was gone.
| xnx wrote:
| Google Voice is weird. It seemed like they should've killed
| it, but they just added a few minor features this week.
| Multicomp wrote:
| Somewhere we are going to get the novel about the quiet
| hero team anonymously keeping Google voice going all
| these decades.
|
| contorting to keep it off management's radar, explain
| away any foibles, redirecting minor funds to get
| maintenance and tech debt paid off just enough to work
| another year, someone's going to write that tech story
| some time.
|
| Even if it's fictional it will be a good read.
| vel0city wrote:
| It felt like it was slowly withering until they rolled it
| into their business communications suite a few years ago.
| Now it is pretty much a proper part of Workspace.
| dustincoates wrote:
| I've used Google Voice as my primary number since 2010, and
| started using it before Google even owned it (i.e., when it
| was Grandcentral).
|
| Development seems to have (relatively) picked up recently.
| There was a period of about five years when I don't think
| there were any publicly announced developments. Now we'll
| get maybe one a year or so.
| bsimpson wrote:
| I've used Google Voice as my primary number since 2010.
|
| It mostly works flawlessly. It's cool that you can use wifi
| calling when abroad and the POTS network domestically, all
| transparently from the POV of the person calling you.
|
| I have noticed that some services (Square, Venmo, and
| Ticketmaster come to mind) don't like sending 2FA texts to
| VoIP numbers. I end up needing to use whatever SIM I have at
| the time or a relative's number for those, and I'm low key
| anxious I'll be locked out of my account someday.
| jim180 wrote:
| I use tello.com. You can get eSIM and activate it while you are
| outside the U.S. If you won't activate roaming, sms and calling
| will use wifi calling.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Do you know how providers detect your country when using wifi
| calling? Mine says it's only valid while you are within the
| country, wonder if VPN would work around it.
| jim180 wrote:
| No idea, but Tello always worked outside of the U.S -
| Lithuania in my case.
|
| I guess, provider will always consider your country where
| the phone number is located. Funny thing, while I'm
| roaming, my IP address will always be Lithuanian. It does
| not matter where the world I'm currently staying.
| onlygoose wrote:
| This is the major way roaming is implemented,
| transferring all data through your home network greatly
| simplifies things.
| onlygoose wrote:
| They can detect your country by IP address. Also AFAIR your
| cellphone sends CellID and/or location with every wifi
| calling connection attempt.
| SXX wrote:
| Tello costs at least $5 / month though. Skype was jusy pay as
| you go.
| csomar wrote:
| I pay $6.5/month for the number. It is pay as you go for
| calling but you have to pay for the number.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| TextNow, $10 a month
| kolp wrote:
| Try voip.ms. Incoming texts can be sent to you as an email. A
| US number costs about $1.50 a month.
| csomar wrote:
| I have the same problem and I want something as straightforward
| and un-scammy looking as Skype. And no, I don't want to
| configure some SIP client or some stuff like that.
| zie wrote:
| jmp.chat should, though I have no direct experience with it
| outside the US for long periods of time, I can't seem them
| caring.
| riffraff wrote:
| Skype got me through my first few years living in a different
| country from my family/friends/girlfriend/enployer.
|
| There was a time when whole companies were on Skype the way
| they're now on Slack.
|
| It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged it.
| sky2224 wrote:
| > It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged it.
|
| It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged a lot of
| products. It genuinely makes me think they're aware of it at
| this point.
| gloxkiqcza wrote:
| Skype for Business UX > MS Teams UX
| lmz wrote:
| But Skype for Business isn't even Skype. Wasn't it just a
| rebranding of MS Lync?
| MandieD wrote:
| Yep. For the first few months after the rebranding, you
| could change a Windows registry setting to get the old Lync
| interface back.
| fiverz wrote:
| Lync because Skype for Business, yes.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which became Teams (somewhat).
|
| All the telephony side of Teams is very clearly Lync in a
| trench coat.
| john_the_writer wrote:
| Yep.. in almost every way it should have beat out slack. It did
| everything better, and had a name. It was so very close, but
| lost. Mostly I think because of how hard it was to get non-
| users into it's eco system.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| wdym non user?? it integrate nicely with windows eg:for
| sometimes skype installed by default on windows
| disillusioned wrote:
| We were one of those companies. I remember that you had to
| alter the order of users added to a group in order to have
| multiple groups (the equivalent of "channels") with the same
| member list. We'd use that trick to essentially have per-
| project channels. It wasn't necessarily super graceful, but it
| mostly worked.
|
| When we made the jump to Slack in early 2014, we migrated as
| much of our Skype history as we could, which was _a project_,
| but again, mostly worked.
| moomin wrote:
| I'm loving this: it's a complete misfeature that anyone can
| point out is conceptually just wrong, but also implemented so
| incompetently there's a workaround.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "Microsoft mismanaged it."
|
| they don't even manage it, like they just let it "stay" that
| way
|
| I think this is the problem with Trillion dollar company, they
| don't want focus on "small money" problem and they can just buy
| tech/company if they find it important enough in the future
| ipnon wrote:
| I can still hear the ringtone.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I can hear the Skype ringtone clear in my head despite not
| hearing it in years. But I can't remember the Microsoft teams
| one despite hearing it multiple times today.
| misantroop wrote:
| Microsoft help pages claiming that they will not refund your
| unused credits if your card has expired or details changed. So
| Microsoft effectively is taking all the users credit for
| themselves. Filing a complain with the appropriate EU regulator
| on this as debit/credit cards expire regularly and that's just an
| excuse for Microsoft to take your funds.
| switch007 wrote:
| Legally I'm sure they're covered. We've probably purchased non
| refundable "credits" that just happen to show in a format that
| resembles money but absolutely aren't money or exchangeable for
| money.
|
| It's not their first time at taking our unused money, sorry
| credits
| isaacremuant wrote:
| MS was always going to kill Skype once they purchased it. One way
| or another.
|
| I remember how it ceased working on Linux once they bought it but
| I'm not sure whether it had to do with moving to centralised
| servers or if it had been moved from P2P long before.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| > _I remember how it ceased working on Linux once they bought
| it_
|
| I can't speak for long ago, if that's what you're referring to,
| but the last two generations of the Skype client have run just
| fine on Linux. I've been using it for the last five years. My
| only _real_ annoyance with it (that is, the Linux client rather
| than Skype problems in general, which have steadily got worse)
| is that it relies on an org.freedesktop.secrets implementation
| (e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet) to stay logged in, and so because
| I stubbornly don't have such a thing (I have _no_ other
| software that wants such a thing, and I use Sway so anything
| will be poorly-integrated), I have to log in every time it
| restarts. And it's _really slow_ to start, badly-implemented
| web tech UI; twenty seconds to start and show the normal
| logged-in start screen, then it decides you've been signed out
| and takes you back to the login screen... all up, it tends to
| take almost a minute to start, including typing password.
| Except that some time in the last couple of months it broke
| further, and now freezes up for a minute before taking you to
| the login screen, in which it also requires you to enter
| username, not just password. So now it's more like a solid
| _two_ minutes of startup time, if you're paying attention to
| it.
| kennysoona wrote:
| That all sounds like an issue with your particular setup more
| than with Skype. Just because that isn't how the Linux app
| works for most people at all.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| Which thing? Relying on keychain to stay logged in, or bad
| startup performance, or the most recent minute-long freeze?
|
| GNOME/KDE users should have a keychain running, so it won't
| affect them. It'll only affect people who roll their own
| stack a bit more. I don't object to it using the keychain
| if it's _available_ , but refusing to keep you logged in if
| it's absent is bad. _Nothing_ else acts like that.
| kennysoona wrote:
| I'm saying I think all the issues you are reporting,
| including the lag times and such, seem specific to your
| setup, maybe Sway specifically or Wayland. I don't use
| Gnome or KDE or have any keychain stuff installed, I run
| Alpine with Awesome, and haven't experienced the same
| issues you have.
| fithisux wrote:
| They can open source it.
| Agraillo wrote:
| Unless they also make the patents coming with it public, it
| would be of no use. As long as I remember, Microsoft has no
| good history of purchasing patents and making them public.
| Google has (vp7,vp8, Webm as an evolution). But probably some
| of the patents are expired anyway.
|
| I also doubt that they would open source the ported version (c#
| I suppose) but they could do this to the previous Delphi
| version, they developed many useful components so even without
| the core functionality, UI code might be useful for
| Lazarus/Delphi developers
| tomhoward wrote:
| I just deleted it from my phone, yesterday. I haven't actively
| used it in I don't know how many years; maybe briefly last year
| when traveling o/s and needing to make a landline call to a
| number back home, but other than that, pretty much no use for
| years, and lately all I've been getting was crypto spam group
| chats.
|
| I remember how amazing it seemed when I was doing the "digital
| nomad" thing in the mid-late 00s, using Skype to redirect my
| landline number from home to my mobile (some Nokia thing,
| whatever was the best one for 20-somethings in 2006) with a local
| SIM as I caught buses around Thailand and Vietnam. It seemed so
| futuristic and exciting to be able to break free of the
| constraints of being stuck in one place - to travel around exotic
| places but still be connected to your work and contacts at home.
|
| That said, most of the calls I received on that trip were
| telemarketing nuisance calls, so, as always, the reality didn't
| quite live up to the fantasy. Still, looking back it feels like
| it was a more optimistic and wondrous time.
| dijit wrote:
| End of an era, but the writing was on the wall.
|
| I have fond memories of using skype to contact my friends and
| family circa-2011 when I was working for Nokia in Finland.
|
| Ironically, microsoft killed nokia the same way microsoft killed
| skype, an acquisition and then strangulation.
|
| if nothing else, it's at least two times the european tech sector
| was actively harmed by US tech giants... which isn't much, but
| weird that it happened twice.
| klohto wrote:
| > actively harmed by US tech giants
|
| Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European
| leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought.
| Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to
| bootstrap a startup culture here.
| sl-1 wrote:
| Nope, Nokia was killed via suicide-by-microsoft-exec. They
| took in a MS aligned CEO and promptly proceeded to destroy
| their own chance of competing (using Maemo/meego or android
| for their phones) by using MS operating system.
|
| I guess one could call it leadership stagnation, but I would
| argue more it being just plain old stupidity
| ahoka wrote:
| Microsoft did not buy or kill Nokia though.
| caseyy wrote:
| I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in
| the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full
| of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated. There
| was a vibe of "things are going to change around here, no
| more free rides, the grown-ups have arrived." Awful
| management decisions were made, most of the talent left, and
| the team from the original company now only exists on paper.
|
| n=1 and all, but I've heard similar stories. European tech
| companies have very different cultures and ways of making
| money, shaped by our laws and consumer expectations.
|
| Skype, for example, was used as a pay phone and a simple
| messaging app before Microsoft bought it. You put in a euro,
| and you call and message your friends. It mutated into a
| bloated Microsoft Live app with several different front-ends,
| including some integrations with Office and various
| subscription services that sold the same thing in multiple
| ways. Core features stopped working, too. I'm sure someone
| liked the Frankenstein monster that it became (I don't kink-
| shame sadists), but most of the original users, and
| especially Europeans, did not.
|
| If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype except for taking out a
| competitor, I'd say the decline would have been the result of
| managerial incompetence and American managers' lack of
| understanding of Europe. But of course, once a competitor
| bought Skype, there was no reason for it to exist anymore, so
| perhaps that is the reason it died.
|
| Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech
| often fails to do business here within the local culture and
| laws, too.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech
| in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite
| full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we
| operated.
|
| Yup, that's also my experience. Americans are just like the
| unofficial President - they don't take "no" for an answer
| when they demand something, no matter what, unless you
| manage to get court judgements because that actually
| threatens the bottom line.
|
| > Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big
| tech often fails to do business here within the local
| culture and laws, too.
|
| I always remember when Wal-Mart tried to come to Germany...
| and had to leave with its tail tucked in because they just
| couldn't cope with stuff being done differently here [1].
|
| [1] https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-
| failed-...
| kennysoona wrote:
| > Americans are just like the unofficial President -
|
| You mean Trump? He's a disaster and anyone that voted for
| him should be ashamed, but he is unfortunately very
| official.
|
| Edit: Parent more than likely meant Musk as replies to
| this comment explained, I should have figured that out
| but it's too late or early or some other excuse.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I assumed GP was referring to Musk. No one voted for him,
| but he can crash a presidental press meeting to ramble
| about DOGE propoganda.
|
| But it is hard to tell. They are cut from he same cloth
| after all, simply separated by a generation of figuring
| out how to squeeze more out of their labor.
| kennysoona wrote:
| Yeah I agree parent meant Musk. It really is bizarre the
| power he's been handed. Crazy the party that supposedly
| backs 'small government' is fine with that even if it
| takes the form of an unelected fool billionaire being
| given unreasonable amounts of power and doing nothing but
| causing damage.
| arielcostas wrote:
| > You mean Trump?
|
| GP probably meant the immigrant billionaire standing next
| to him all the time, who can't even bother to dress
| properly to meet with (arguably) some of the most
| important people in your country, aka Elon Musk.
| kennysoona wrote:
| Oh yeah, I should have gotten that!
| re-thc wrote:
| > You mean Trump?
|
| That's the official 1.
| kennysoona wrote:
| Yeah should have figured parent meant Musk, I've referred
| to him as President Musk enough times to make the same
| point.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >Walmart employees are required to stand in formation and
| chant, "WALMART! WALMART! WALMART!" while performing
| synchronized group calisthenics.
|
| Do they still do this to this day? This is definitely an
| -ism of the early 2010's but I figured corporate stopped
| pretending that "we're family" by the close of the
| decade.
|
| The smiling argument makes perfect sense. I hear several
| EU countries simply have a more blunt approach and pretty
| neutral mannerisms towards strangers. Americans would
| call the approach "cold", so there's definitely a cultral
| difference.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > I hear several EU countries simply have a more blunt
| approach and pretty neutral mannerisms towards strangers.
| Americans would call the approach "cold", so there's
| definitely a cultral difference.
|
| Yeah. To put it blunt: When I want to get smiled at, I
| either woo a partner or go to a brothel.
| wyclif wrote:
| >unofficial President
|
| That sure is a funny way to refer to a president who was
| elected by _both_ the popular vote and the Electoral
| College. I 'm no fan of Trump, but it sounds like a form
| of derangement syndrome to believe that he wasn't
| democratically elected.
| TMWNN wrote:
| "unofficial President" is mschuster91's oh-so-witty way
| of referring to Musk.
| immibis wrote:
| And he was elected by both the popular vote and the
| electoral college.
| xnorswap wrote:
| I too have worked for a European company bought out by a
| large American company.
|
| They too didn't understand our culture. They completely
| ignored the parts of our business that were scalable and
| taking off, and focused instead on nebulous "synergies".
| They actually seemed more interested in us taking on their
| branding than what we actually did. They'd push down
| demands to chase some latest trends but when we needed
| something back from them they struggled to give us the time
| of day.
|
| They also immediately tried to give pay cuts and force
| immediate redundancies and seemed shocked to discover they
| couldn't legally do that. So instead they had to polite
| request that people in our company take a pay cut. I only
| know of one person naive enough to take them up on that
| offer.
|
| I left a few years post acquisition, it was clear things
| would not get better we were just left rudderless because
| we'd previously been run by the founder for ~25 years and
| now were run by no-one with no direction.
| pembrook wrote:
| What both of you are describing is just what normally
| happens with MOST acquisitions (regardless of the
| nationality of the acquirer).
|
| Most acquisitions don't turn into YouTube or
| WhatsApp/Instagram-level success for the acquirer. The
| academic literature on CEOs empire building via
| acquisition is that most of the time it's value
| destructive.
|
| I love a good US vs Europe debate but acquisitions aren't
| an area where either corporate culture excels. European
| acquirers are equally as careless with their gobbled up
| playthings.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| What I gather about the differences between American and
| European attitudes towards work hours and vacation leads
| me to believe that there's actually a material difference
| between American and European acquisitions. I'm certain
| that new Euro bosses don't walk in expecting to be able
| to pull everyone back from summer holiday on a whim, but
| I've heard of just such a thing happening when we
| Americans rolled in.
| hulitu wrote:
| > If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype.
|
| Yes, it was used as a backdoor to scrap user data when the
| computer was not in use. That's why i uninstalled it.
| skeletal88 wrote:
| Anecdote about MS and Skype.
|
| Knew a developer who worked there.
|
| Day 1 of aquisition - there were 4 layers of managers
| between him and Steve Ballmer.
|
| A year later there were 8. Tjis is how much bureaucracy and
| managers MS added in only one year
| jajko wrote:
| > Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European
| leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought.
| Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to
| bootstrap a startup culture here.
|
| What? None of those were EU government owned, all was
| private. Do people really have this sort of (completely
| incorrect) view on how things work in Europe? Not even donald
| was ever stating such ridiculous things
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Who said they were government owned though?
|
| Stagnation and risk averseness is pretty much the default
| when it comes to most major European companies. In almost
| any sector.
| jajko wrote:
| Not true, just some cheap internet meme for people too
| lazy to bother understanding economics and different
| principles US and European societies and markets work on.
|
| And the claim of parent that income from sales would go
| to EU, which is not true, it went to Nokia owners who
| aren't in any meaning 'EU'. Its like saying any sale of
| any US private company to some foreign one goes to trump
| and his government.
|
| Your post is typical lazy propagation of trivially
| verifiable made up claims, not sure even by whom or for
| what purpose, but this forum has higher standards
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| "microsoft killed nokia"
|
| nokia did that to themselves, microsoft aquisition just
| prolonged its inevitable ends
| skrebbel wrote:
| Sure, though if you strangle a junkie about to OD, you still
| strangled them.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Loved my yellow Lumia 920. I thought the panels and scrolling
| start screen was much better (concurrently used Android and
| iOS at that time).
|
| Just like with Zune, it was not part of MS strategy and
| therefor dropped. You need to keep working on something like
| this for years to make it successful. Large companies though
| drop products that are not a huge success after two years,
| associated with such products is a career killer.
|
| [Edit] I got the Lumia to decide as a CTO at that time if we
| would go into Windows phones or not. I asked for more Lumias
| and XBox (to show cross plattform eCommerce) from MS to
| evangelize inside the company, but was let hung dry. So we
| did not support Windows phones. They never went full in.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| absolutely the fact they just give out on hardware side
| eg:nokia,surface device,zune,vr headset etc is just
| disappointing
|
| I think this is about company culture as a whole too, MS
| only know how to make software
|
| this is same problem with google too, with pixel device is
| very underwhelming success given how many resource they
| have
| robertlagrant wrote:
| If I remember correctly, the CEO at the time Steve Ballmer
| said they were betting the farm on mobile and ARM-based
| tablet computing. They went very hard on mobile until
| SatNad came along and killed it.
|
| (Former Touch Diamond user here.)
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| And here we are, in a world where Apple has made arm work
| wonders for them and Windows still isn't really a thing
| on ARM 10 years after ballmer resigned.
|
| Then again arm doesn't seem to be necessary when looking
| at AMDs APU offerings. It was just a decade of intel
| struggling with their fabs.
| dcow wrote:
| Windows is definitely on arm. It just sucks because
| Qualcomm failed to deliver a good cpu package. The
| experience is within a stones throw of Apple, though.
|
| I also have one of the new AMD 300 AI platforms, and it
| still can't do power right. Either the laptop is
| miserably slow on battery, or runs way too hot on power.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Yes, it is on arm and has been for decades in some form,
| but it's still nowhere near its M1 moment.
| etempleton wrote:
| I think the bigger issue is legacy software on Windows.
| It is Windows biggest moat and also their biggest
| albatross. So many companies and individuals rely on a
| specific piece of software that will never be ported to
| ARM. Microsoft can't force the conversion. Developers
| have no incentive to support both until there is a
| critical mass of users and there will never be a critical
| mass of users unless ARM is 3x better than whatever Intel
| / AMD can deliver. On mobile it got close for a moment in
| terms of efficiency and then Intel and AMD immediately
| closed the gap. No incentive for users to switch.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They really should do a clean slate OS where native apps
| are all C# and legacy stuff is run in a VM. An ARM Xbox
| would also help develop a gaming ecosystem without the
| massive legacy concerns.
| etempleton wrote:
| But then they lose their moat. Why not Linux then? Why
| not Mac OS?
| Lammy wrote:
| Relevant: Singularity/Midori (2003-2015)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_syst
| em)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-
| content/uploads/...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20090112172352/http://researc
| h.m...
|
| https://read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs261-f11/sin
| gul...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20180228191626/https://archiv
| e.c...
| martinsnow wrote:
| You bring up bad memories. I fucking hated my htc touch
| diamond. It was pretty but man was it slow.
| out_of_protocol wrote:
| That was the funny story - Nokia got it's latest CEO (Stephen
| Elop) from M$, successfully almost-destroyed company, got it
| acquired by M$ and hopped back to M$. So, probably, it was
| the plan all along
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| why do you think this is happen in the first place???
|
| the Board and Shareholder knew that it was sinking ships so
| it want cashout to Microsoft at least before its going to
| rubble
| spwa4 wrote:
| Exactly. There's a _business_ reason hardware companies
| like Nokia got killed (because it wasn 't just Nokia.
| Lots of telco hardware companies were making handsets
| before and aren't anymore). That seems to me to be that
| Nokia didn't know how to make $100/user/year by
| controlling the software like MS and Google do (MS with
| "enterprise" sales and ads, Google with ads)
|
| Also makes the choice for Microsoft, as opposed to anyone
| else, very understandable. The other choice that "worked"
| for cell phone companies was to be a Chinese company,
| with state subsidies amounting to zero, maybe even
| negative tax, no environmental regulations at all (my
| favorite whoopsie was an algae bloom that started inside
| China and reached 1/4th to 1/3rd the way from China to
| the US. It is terrifying to think about just how many
| fish, animals and plants must have suffocated when that
| happened), plus definitely using WAY cheaper labor, maybe
| even using slave labor.
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| I think you just hating and out of touch with reality (if
| this is not satire) cause how much less substance this
| comment are
|
| the simple reason they die is because they sucks, that's
| just it. HN user just overthinking this simple reason the
| CONSUMER want
|
| user just want something that's good, that's why nokia
| and blackberry die not because they got killed by another
| big corpo, but because they can't adapt
| martinsnow wrote:
| Yeah sales speak for themselves
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yeah I don't agree with the tone of this comment but the
| substance is correct. I didn't own a Nokia phone, so I
| can't speak to that. But Blackberry died because their
| phones just plain sucked. Even before the modern
| smartphone era they were unpleasant to use, but at least
| they were enabling something that nobody else did. But
| once the iPhone came along (and Android after that), they
| had competitors who were flat out better than them in
| every way.
|
| And even that wouldn't have necessarily killed them, if
| they had adapted quickly to make this new kind of phone.
| But instead they made the Blackberry Storm as a "hey we
| can do this touchscreen thing too", but crippled it by
| giving it a resistive touchscreen which was incredibly
| unpleasant to use relative to the competition. And iirc
| they still insisted on tying it to BES, even though their
| competitors offered an email experience which Just Worked
| without having to use RIM's server. It seemed (from the
| outside to be fair) like RIM refused to recognize that
| the competition had blown them out of the water, so
| instead of pivoting to catch up they doggedly tried to
| offer "what we had before, but with grudging minimal
| concessions to the things our customers want". But that
| was never going to work, because customers had never
| liked their original model to begin with. They liked what
| it enabled for them, but once competitors could offer the
| same benefits with a more pleasant to use interface, it
| was over for that model.
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Not true. Nokia was already dying. Microsoft made a bad attempt
| to save Nokia when the heart had already stopped.
| pembrook wrote:
| Same for Skype.
|
| Yes, most acquirers bungle the acquisition (regardless of
| nationality), but the reason these companies decide to sell
| in the first place is because _their future prospects on
| their own don't look great._
|
| Skype was a consumer success but consumers violently hate
| paying for software (just read HN).
|
| The market for video calls-as-a-business is entirely B2B.
| Skype with their fun whimsical branding and non-sales
| dominant culture couldn't hack it. Plus, big dumb enterprises
| hate screening new vendors, so Microsoft/Cisco/etc were
| always going to win that space.
|
| Zoom basically swooped in later able to take all the
| learnings from Skype and go B2B from the start.
| eloisant wrote:
| Microsoft planted Stephen Elop to make sure they kill all
| their effort at a modern mobile OS so they end up using
| Windows Phone.
| hbn wrote:
| That was almost the Dr Doofenshmirtz "if I had a nickel" quote
| nneonneo wrote:
| I put $10 on an account over ten years ago to make sporadic calls
| (e.g. customer service in other countries). That account still
| has $5 left, and I've made a ton of calls to many different
| countries.
|
| What's a good alternative here? I just want to make outgoing
| international calls cheaply.
| rwmj wrote:
| Especially an alternative that doesn't mean giving money to
| Google or using any Meta service.
| pm3003 wrote:
| SIP providers. I used Ippi before 2015, but then EU regulations
| made it illegal to bill more for EU calls than for domestic
| calls, so I had almost no more use for it.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I use MobileVOIP, but voice quality and the probability of a
| call to connect is inferior to Skype.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| 30-50 cents per minute is very expensive.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| Checked prices, Skype is more expensive.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| I'm in the same boat, I wonder if you can use the web interface
| from a 4g modem to make calls/send&recieve SMS messages. Could
| install a cloudflare tunnel on it and access it while abroad.
|
| I know you can do sms messages, but I'm not sure about calls.
|
| Perhaps an old Android phone could be used for this?
| edwcross wrote:
| Microsoft killed Skype for me a few months ago: the Linux version
| simply stopped working, and unless I install a Snap-based one
| (which I cannot do remotely on family computers), it's now
| useless.
|
| Also, my Skype credit simply disappeared from the account
| (granted, it had been sitting idle for a few years, but still).
|
| WhatsApp, Signal and similar apps completely replaced Skype,
| which stopped innovating years ago. Other than some "automatic
| captioning" based on Bing, and interface changes that are
| annoying for computer-illiterate people, barely anything changed.
|
| For several years, Skype had been a very lightweight way to
| communicate with people with not-so-good computers and flaky
| Internet connection. Trying to replace it with Jitsi, for
| instance, quickly shows how much more CPU is needed to run that
| instead. But then the Linux version started being packaged
| differently (Electron?), so that was lost as well.
|
| Well, it will likely survive for some time on old companies that
| still use Skype for Business.
| wuschel wrote:
| Skype was very useful to call landlines from or two countries
| e.g. Europe to India. To my knowledge, Whatsapp et al do not
| fill this niche.
|
| Is there another solution that has this functionality?
| pm3003 wrote:
| SIP providers, such as Ippi.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I use MobileVOIP, but voice quality and the probability of a
| call to connect is inferior to Skype.
| kombine wrote:
| I used to use Skype to call my grandfather's landline back
| home, until he passed away two years ago. I just opened Skype
| to scroll through our call history all the way to 2018. It
| will be gone soon just like he did.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Used to, now they are kinda expensive (as most of providers).
| croisillon wrote:
| yeah my Skype credit has been quietly gulped too but officially
| you can reactivate it when needed
| SXX wrote:
| It's still possible through website. Makes me wonder if they
| will refund me mine.
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| > unless I install a Snap-based one (which I cannot do remotely
| on family computers)
|
| I find that surprising - you could do something like "snap
| install skype" from the command line. Do you not have remote
| command line access?
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| And the amazing algo that made skype work as a P2P system with
| very little bandwidth circa 2000 is now lost. Locked down in
| Microsoft's proprietary attic gathering dust while each conf
| app gets worse as the time goes by.
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| I'm one of the apparently few people still using Skype, had the
| same issue with Skype just no longer working one day. But I was
| easily able to install the Snap package remotely on both my
| parents' laptops, wasn't any harder than any typical remote
| install.
|
| As much as Skype has deteriorated, I've happily kept using it
| since signing up for an account very early, probably in 2004 or
| even 2003. And I'm not even sure what to replace it with for
| family communications. I want something that works on desktop,
| phones and tablets without requiring a power user. Signal is my
| preference on phones but it doesn't work on an Android tablet.
| I don't want to use WhatsApp, I've never used any Meta-owned
| service and that's the number one tech company I want to avoid.
| So it's not easy to replace Skype.
| wewewedxfgdf wrote:
| I'll take it!
| john_the_writer wrote:
| It lost all hope when it demanded the same login as windows. No
| longer could I have a semi-annon chat tool. I didn't want a "one
| password for everything" experience.
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| Amazing how neglected this service was considering Microsoft paid
| billions. Are there companies that do acquisitions well without
| killing the thing they acquire?
| caseyy wrote:
| When Microsoft acquired Skype (the company), it was clear they
| would kill it. Skype had previously been bought by eBay, for
| which it served the purpose of entering a new market. Then, it
| was bought by some investment funds, for which it served the
| purpose of making money. However, to Microsoft, which already had
| its Windows/Live messenger (which copied Skype's homework
| anyway), Skype served no purpose except to remove a competitor.
| They did not have a reason to develop it.
|
| I'm surprised, in some ways, that it took almost 15 years for it
| to die. If Microsoft absorbed the Skype tech in 1 year and
| rebranded/reskinned Live Messenger to look like Skype, they could
| have been done with it in 2012.
|
| Now, they are retiring Live Messenger and Skype. Two technologies
| have become zero. It is interesting that they chose to go this
| way.
| wsc981 wrote:
| I am not even sure if Microsoft was interested in the
| technology. I believe Skype originally functioned using some
| kind of p2p network. I believe Microsoft replaced this way of
| working shortly after acquiring Skype. Perhaps on behalf of
| security agencies.
| caseyy wrote:
| Perhaps. I would more readily believe that if Microsoft
| didn't have an established pattern of killing competitor
| companies and tech.
|
| I think they really tried to merge Skype with Live Messenger,
| stripping Skype for parts. And maybe those parts weren't the
| tech as much as the brand, but we don't know how much tech
| they adopted.
| mrweasel wrote:
| I seem to recall that Skype had the concept of "super nodes"
| which could facilitate NAT traversal for of users which
| didn't have a direct internet connection. Microsoft got rid
| of that pretty fast and replaced it with Microsoft managed
| servers (which to be fair seems less sketchy that using
| random users machines as something akin to a STUN server).
| grishka wrote:
| > I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of
| p2p network.
|
| It did! It was some impressively cool tech too. At the time,
| at least in my country, some ISPs would disable your internet
| access when you didn't pay, but the LAN between subscribers
| still worked. So obviously nothing worked, _except Skype_. My
| theory then was that it would find a path to route around the
| disconnection by having the Skype client of a different
| subscriber on the same LAN, that did have internet access,
| relay your traffic to the rest of the network.
| machomaster wrote:
| This approach to technology has serious problems. I would
| send a message to someone and turned off my computer,
| thinking that the message would be sent whenever the
| recipient was online. However, that was not the case. The
| message only arrived when we were online at the same time.
| Therefore, Skype is completely useless as a tool for
| asynchronous communication, for the main type of messaging!
| grishka wrote:
| Maybe, but somehow it didn't matter very much back then.
| I remember using private chats mostly as an addition to
| calls, i.e. when I wanted to send someone a link or a
| file I was talking about. If I wanted to just send a
| message to someone regardless of whether they were
| online, Skype wasn't really an option I considered, it
| was ICQ, later VKontakte, and now Telegram.
|
| Group chats in Skype though, _those_ were popular.
| Nothing else had good group chats at the time, but then
| again, after VK introduced them, everyone I know quickly
| moved there. I don 't know how message delivery worked
| there, but you could receive messages that were sent
| while you were offline just fine. Maybe you got them from
| any one online participant, or maybe the "supernodes" did
| some sort of store-and-forward thing, or maybe a bit of
| both.
| nielssp wrote:
| I'm pretty sure that's how most, if not all, instant
| messaging services worked 20 years ago... Was a feature,
| not a bug. The whole idea of sending an _instant_
| message. If you wanted to send a non-instant message, you
| 'd send an email instead.
| grishka wrote:
| ICQ worked more like SMS. You could send a message to
| someone who's offline. It would get stored on the server
| and delivered when they come online.
| Agraillo wrote:
| We take the modern internet speeds for granted, at that time
| the tech behind Skype was top notch and probably when Skype
| made its way into Windows, that looked like the original
| destination. But later many questionable decisions made things
| worse even before the internet became faster and other voice
| technologies were up to the task. One of them was changing the
| protocol that made many headsets bricked. Probably from the
| marketing point of view it was a "if one wants Skype, he or she
| would buy Windows" step, but obviously it was not
| basisword wrote:
| Live Messenger (previously MSN Messenger) was another massive
| fumble by Microsoft. It was absolutely essential as a teenager
| in the 00's and people spent insane amounts of time on it. If
| MS put out a 'dumb' phone with Live Messenger they might have
| stood a chance when smart phones came around.
| caseyy wrote:
| They had an iOS app that surprisingly few people knew
| existed.
|
| https://www.macstories.net/iphone/microsoft-releases-
| windows...
| vel0city wrote:
| I had a few dumb phones that IIRC supported MSN messenger
| pre-iPhone. They also often supported AIM and even sometimes
| Yahoo messenger.
| fergie wrote:
| Did Skype ever, like, actually work? I gave it a few chances over
| the years, but personally, despite living in an area with very
| fast broadband, it was always had quality issues. For me, Ichat
| and Hangouts always worked better.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Calls worked great for me, but it's not been able to reliably
| show a contacts online status for years
| seba_dos1 wrote:
| Skype worked well a decade before Hangouts even existed. It
| then went through Microsoft's "reinventions" that basically
| rebuilt it from scratch.
| tech234a wrote:
| I agree that it's not surprising, but I'd suspect that the name
| and a lot of the infrastructure will remain in various places. As
| others in the thread have pointed out, Teams appears to use a lot
| of Skype's architecture.
|
| GroupMe is also still listed on the App Store with Skype as the
| developer, though their website lists Microsoft as the developer
| instead. GroupMe has seen recent feature updates, so I'd suspect
| it would be mostly unaffected. Interestingly enough, GroupMe
| still has a public API [1], so in that sense it is more open than
| Skype is these days.
|
| Also of note is that the Microsoft Account sign-in screen still
| accepts legacy Skype names as an alternative for an email address
| or phone number. It would be interesting if the ability to log
| into Microsoft Accounts this way outlives Skype itself.
|
| [1]: https://dev.groupme.com/
| bsimpson wrote:
| My day-to-day computers have always been Macs. My use of
| Windows has been relegated to occasional specific devices, like
| a TabletPC sketchbook or a 3D workstation. I don't think I'd
| touched Windows in more than a dozen years when I got a gaming
| handheld last year.
|
| It asked me for a Microsoft account (which I presumed I didn't
| have) or Skype. I took a guess at my old Skype credentials and
| proceeded with setup. I was both surprised and upset to
| discover that by username on the device was a 5 character
| truncation of my old Skype handle.
| _ink_ wrote:
| What is the alternative to do cheap calls abroad?
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| I use MobileVOIP, but voice quality and the probability of a
| call to connect is inferior to Skype.
| emrahcom wrote:
| If both users are using Chrome, you may try my Chrome
| extension:
|
| https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eparto-virtual-phon...
| silisili wrote:
| Just a decade or so ago, 'Skype' was the 'Kleenex' of video
| calling. Funny how fast tech moves.
|
| Sad to see it go.
| logicallee wrote:
| EDIT: I got this working, here is what AI can do for you today.
| It's only been 54 minutes since I posted the question at the end
| of this comment:
|
| http://taonexus.com/p2p-voice-video-chat.html
|
| It's p2p voice, video, and chat without logging. To use it send
| someone the link and your peer ID and they can connect to you and
| you can start chatting.
|
| In those 54 minutes I got it working on Chrome, Firefox, and
| mobile including Safari and Chrome, fixed emojis so it worked (I
| had to be in the loop for that and walk it through how to fix
| it). There are no analytics or recording, it just works. It
| totals 468 lines of code.
|
| Writeup about it:
|
| "How we made a Skype alternative in 45 minutes (video, voice,
| chat)."
|
| https://medium.com/@rviragh/how-we-made-a-skype-alternative-...
|
| --
|
| My original question:
|
| Question from the State of Utopia:[1] would you like a free
| State-run alternative?
|
| What you could expect if you say yes: our AI infrastructure can
| currently produce a total of about 1,000 lines of code, this is
| enough for us to get peer to peer person to person calling on
| mobile from a browser and Desktop, with voice, video, ephemeral
| chat that isn't saved at the end of the session, including
| emojis, and no address book, and no logging or recording or even
| analytics. We previously got peer to peer filesharing working
| with webrtc: https://taonexus.com/p2pfilesharing/ it is buggy but
| worked for us, barely.
|
| We probably can't get multiple people in the same conversation,
| it could be too difficult for our AI.
|
| We can't build something as complicated as a browser (our
| attempt: https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/feb2025/84toy-toy-
| browser-w...
|
| So don't get your hopes up, but we could get the basic
| infrastructure up, barely. Would that be of any benefit to anyone
| today?
|
| [1] The State of Utopia (which will be available at
| stateofutopia.com or stofut.com - St. of Ut. - for short) is a
| sovereign country with the vision of using autonomous AI that
| "owns itself" to give free money, goods, and services, to its
| citizens/beneficiaries - it is a country rather than a company
| because it acts in the interests of its citizens/beneficiaries
| rather than shareholders.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| So they Nokia-ed Skype. RIP.
| DeathArrow wrote:
| Now I really hope Microsoft buys Google.
| esafak wrote:
| Why??
| DeathArrow wrote:
| It seems Microsoft is moving over from apps, desktop and mobile.
|
| Apart from developer tools, Office, Windows and some games, it
| seems they killed everything.
|
| Judging on how Windows releases seem to be degrading, I wonder if
| they will try to pull the plug from there, too.
| mid-kid wrote:
| This makes me wonder, are my old chats still around? Is there any
| tool to back them up? Skype played a major role in my life for a
| good while, which I'd want to preserve.
| seydor wrote:
| yes you can download your skype chats
| https://secure.skype.com/en/data-export
| mid-kid wrote:
| Thanks! I exported my data through this and it didn't take
| too long. Unfortunately this has the same issue as every
| other data export tool, in that it doesn't let you infer
| context in surrounding messages, it only saves yours.
|
| Also apparently chat logs didn't start being kept until
| sometime around 2017, most of my extensive skype use was
| around 2014, so I reckon it's all gone by now. Shame.
| thiscatis wrote:
| "Teams for Consumers" The product name already is an omen on how
| "successful" this will be.
| drooopy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Obligatory "Internal structure of tech companies": https:
| //www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...
| teddyh wrote:
| Link to original artist:
| <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts>
|
| (Including a partial update:
| <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update>)
| robotnikman wrote:
| The Oracle one always gets me lmao
| decimalenough wrote:
| Lync was completely unrelated software with a different
| tech stack that was just branded as Skype.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business
| dcminter wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 8EUR/mo/user, Teams
| Essentials is 4EUR/user/mo, M365 Business Basic is
| 6EUR/user/mo.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| At Microsoft, for every Principal Engineer/Manager
| there's a dead internal project that nobody uses but had
| "... lots of impact."
| bayindirh wrote:
| 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.
| Lammy wrote:
| > "Microsoft is a corporation built upon the idea of
| _intellectual property_ ".
|
| Relevant:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean time has proven over and over that Gates and
| Microsoft were right.
|
| If your business is developing and selling software to
| businesses then you want a proprietary license and
| usually to give it away for non-commercial use. If your
| business is selling direct to consumer then you need a
| proprietary license, no source available, and probably
| DRM.
|
| If your business is something unrelated to software, and
| uses software as a means rather than an end then OSS is
| your friend.
| h2zizzle wrote:
| America has multiple examples of companies that thrived
| for decades until a certain type of manager showed up (of
| which leet code engineers are an aspect; clueless MBA
| grads are another; there are more). Sears. General
| Electric. IBM. Companies need to develop a sort of immune
| response to this type, as they are as charismatic as they
| are deleterious to company outlooks, and WILL worm their
| way in if not checked. A more effective Matthew Broderick
| to stay the Reese Witherspoons of the world.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| As long as the companies have a completely autocratic
| structure, there is no possible way to develop any kind
| of immune response.
| windex wrote:
| >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.
| addicted wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| nickdothutton wrote:
| Easier to monitor if centralised.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Yes, everyone and their Windows installs and their _NSAKEY
| guessed the reason was that.
| tombert wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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" http
| s://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/ (2011)
| qingcharles wrote:
| Well, the better ask is why eBay bought it...
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 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.hugheshubbard.com/news/the-best-laid-m-a-
| plans-h...
| hedgehog wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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://store.steampowered.com/app/2530450/Continuum/
| Lammy wrote:
| Amusingly KaZaA itself was one of my first experiences
| using an "alternative" client for something. There was
| KaZaA Lite which removed the bundled Cydoor malware, K++
| which added hax features like unlimited searches and
| forced 1000 node reputation, and the most famous KaZaA
| Lite K++ which did both. Lots of others too like "KL
| Extensions", K-Sig, K-Dat, but those were the two big
| ones.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Makes sense that the SuperPeers core from Kazaa was re-
| used in Skype.
| Beijinger wrote:
| eBay is just a terrible company. (Yet, I like and use it
| more than Amazon).
|
| ebay had Paypal. They had Skype. And Skype was a kind of
| social network.
|
| eBay could have been Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, WYSE,
| but eBay always stayed, eBay.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| Mass surveillance was easier when anyone, including the
| NSA, could run a supernode. Microsoft had to run its own
| supernodes because usage changed from most people running
| Skype on desktops, which could be supernodes, to most
| people running Skype on phones, which can't. At that point,
| it hardly makes sense to push new supernode functionality
| for multiparty video calls and other optimizations to end
| users to handle a small fraction of calls when updating
| your own servers is much easier.
|
| WebRTC will happily set up a P2P video call with better
| encryption than the old Skype had if all you need is a 1-1
| call without NAT traversal.
| smallerfish wrote:
| > if all you need is a 1-1 call without NAT traversal.
|
| That part of your sentence is doing a lot of work. It has
| to be as easy as clicking on a contact for oldsters.
| lern_too_spel wrote:
| That's the point. That's why Skype had supernodes, and
| that's why Skype on mobiles meant that Microsoft needed
| to run its own supernodes. At that point, you might as
| well add features like multiparty video calls, and then
| it makes no sense to have your users install supernodes
| software.
| wslh wrote:
| Back then in 2009 we were [1] intercepting Skype calls
| before the offered plugins.
|
| [1] https://www.nektra.com/main/2009/02/24/directsound-
| capture-u...
| nimish wrote:
| Naw, having been there, Microsoft killed Skype because it
| had no idea how to manage a B2C product.
| sznio wrote:
| Part of it was that performance was abysmal. Everyone jumped
| to Discord (an electron app!) when it released, because it
| performed better.
| theultdev wrote:
| 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.
| mihaaly wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Did they want multi device? How do you sync messages?
| History?
| OvbiousError wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| alabastervlog wrote:
| They don't want records around that expose crimes when
| discovery happens, and they want that so much that they
| shave a percent or two off the company's productivity to
| get it.
| Denvercoder9 wrote:
| > The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay
| for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the
| retention to 1yr.
|
| That doesn't track with my experience as a user at all.
| Almost every day I do a search that returns results older
| than a year.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| If it's important enough to mention in a document then
| the person creating the document should preserve a copy
| of what is clearly ephemeral information. It's just as
| daft was referencing emails in a document.
| crummy wrote:
| This frustrates me too. Discord stores your messages
| forever for free! They're slowly eating Slack's lunch when
| it comes to internet communities... but I guess Slack
| doesn't really care; those communities were never going to
| pay any real money anyway.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| Slowly? Discord is #1 in gaming and probably dev too
| Macha wrote:
| Yeah, I'd say discord taking skype's lunch in the gaming
| market was something that happened "rapidly" and "in
| 2016".
|
| EDIT: Oh, this subthread is about slack.
|
| I do think Slack's permissions model is better suited to
| business use than Discord's.
| el_snark wrote:
| You may like to look at a self-hosted mattermost then.
| bayindirh wrote:
| Slack is part of Salesforce now. Do I need to say anything
| else?
| knowitnone wrote:
| you're getting services for free and you call them cheap?
| soundnote wrote:
| Yeah, I just checked to reply to another commenter, and
| Slack's just expensive:
|
| Slack Pro's 8EUR/mo/user
|
| Teams Essentials is 4EUR/user/mo
|
| M365 Business Basic is 6EUR/user/mo
| delecti wrote:
| At my job we use Teams, but basically just for meetings (and
| the associated chat), and it works really well. About the
| only complaint I could make is that it occasionally guesses
| the wrong audio devices, but it's fairly easy to change them.
|
| I didn't understand all the hate until a few groups tried
| pushing the actual "teams" inside "Teams", and goddamn they
| are _bad_. They 're an awkward and confusing mashup of chat
| rooms and forums, with conversations spread across different
| levels and constructs that each receive different levels of
| UI focus.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Yeah teams for actual phone calls is good, often with
| better noise cancelling and reliability than zoom these
| days.
|
| But the mess of sharepoint/o365 opened in wrappers inside
| of teams for the teams and it's just a hot mess that makes
| me angry when the UI is so different.
| UltraSane wrote:
| At a company I worked at someone saved some important data
| in Teams and left the company and I was tasked with trying
| to export it but it turns out it would have taken
| significant time scripting the API to extract all the data.
| They said forget it and just left it in the Teams and made
| sure not to delete her account.
| stackskipton wrote:
| It's in her OneDrive most likely, go pluck it out of
| there.
| stackskipton wrote:
| That's because "Teams" inside Teams are not part of Teams,
| it's tied to Sharepoint/Exchange and thus poorly
| integrated.
| 7bit wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| dadoum wrote:
| I don't know for other European countries, but at least I
| can say that it is not true in France. "Coke" is reserved
| for cocaine, and cola is the generic word for Coca-Cola-
| like beverages.
| dustincoates wrote:
| I don't drink enough to say for certain, but I'll say
| that I've heard "coca" a lot, but I never hear "cola."
| kiyundai wrote:
| In France coca is a bit generic term for coca cola and
| pepsi But if you have a brand that sell coke we use cola
| Like breizh cola or a <supermarket brand> cola
| thwarted wrote:
| I've heard that the French are strict about language, but
| what does "reserved" mean here? What do the French call
| coke1?
|
| 1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel) ?
| wholinator2 wrote:
| I'd suspect the vast majority of France never has to
| worry about that type of coke, or maybe even knows it
| exists.
| Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote:
| One upon a time wikipedia used to have links to the other
| language wikis on the same entry. Now I have to edit the
| URL to jump to the disambiguation page
| https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke which tells me it is
| also "coke" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(charbon)
| klausa wrote:
| It still does.
|
| There's a button saying "58 languages" on the trailing
| edge of where the title of the page is. It opens a drop-
| down with language selection.
|
| (Presumably the UI is different on mobile, speaking about
| web.)
| selectodude wrote:
| Coca cola, coca light, coca zero.
| bombela wrote:
| "Charbon". The French commoner will refer to the rock
| coke as "charbon de terre", shortened to charbon. Similar
| to "pomme" is apple, and "pomme de terre" is apple from
| the earth (potato). Charbon is also the word for
| charcoal.
|
| So my grandma used charbon (coke) when she was a kid. And
| my mom uses charbon (charcoal) for her barbecue.
|
| In journals and scientific papers the words coke will be
| used.
|
| In everyday speech, coke means cocaine. Coca is short
| form for coca cola. And cola is the generic for a coca
| cola flavored soda.
| chimeracoder wrote:
| > I've heard that the French are strict about language,
| but what does "reserved" mean here? What do the French
| call coke1?
|
| That's also called "coke", which is why there's a Tintin
| book called "Coke en Stock". [0]
|
| That said, if you say "coke" in English, almost nobody
| will think of fuel, and the same is true for French
| speakers today.
|
| [0] https://www.amazon.com/Aventures-Tintin-Stock-French-
| Sharks/...
| pests wrote:
| In the US south if you ask for a coke they will ask which
| kind - Pepsi, sprite, or a Coke coke? Etc
| fh973 wrote:
| In Germany, MS was very successful though to get
| organizations on Teams during the pandemic. Zoom is not a
| thing.
|
| Sure, it's nice to brand the verb, but when the product
| behind it is EOL, why bother.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| That's because teams was offered for fee with m365 which
| most companies used anyway.
|
| Having said that, Zoom is an absolutely terrible product.
| The backdoor they installed in Macs for example and then
| when it was brought to light refused to remove it until
| Apple was forced to blacklist the application. They're
| either incompetent or evil.
| pimeys wrote:
| Looking at the Linux version with their hard coded list
| of supported distros when trying to share your screen...
|
| I'd say both.
| ianbooker wrote:
| Zoom is a thing in Germany.
| ghaff wrote:
| In the US, I would say roughly everyone uses Zoom outside
| of companies using Teams or Meet, generally because
| they're bundled with the office suites they use.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Jitsi and BBB were pretty popular across universities at
| the time, back when the German government were pivoting
| hard into Element/Matrix:
|
| https://element.io/matrix-in-germany
| yardie wrote:
| Zoom was popular with at home schoolkids. Because to use
| Teams you had to have a Microsoft acccount first. Zoom was
| a link, a meeting ID, and password. Sometimes just a link.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| I've actually never had to put a password in to any zoom
| call. It was always just the link. Only when calling from
| a phone did i have to put even the meeting ID in
| porridgeraisin wrote:
| You can optionally add the password as a query parameter
| to the zoom link itself. The links you got probably had
| that.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| robin_reala wrote:
| A deaf colleague massively preferred Zoom to Teams because
| the video quality on Zoom allowed a lot more sign language
| nuance to transfer.
| DrFalkyn wrote:
| Zoom has live captioning at lest for the paid version
| dole wrote:
| Zoom is _widely_ used in US city and state government
| departments because of the ease of use and pricing, basically
| free.
| xioxox wrote:
| It's entirely Zoom for my branch of academia.
| wholinator2 wrote:
| I have literally never once used teams officially in any
| degree. Every call i made before i graduated high school was
| skype, every school and graduate and job call I've ever made
| has been zoom.
| ranger207 wrote:
| My company uses Teams and Zoom. Every Teams meeting is a
| disaster compared to Zoom. At least it's not Amazon Chime.
| IDK how AWS Support survives that
| mrkramer wrote:
| >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.
| goodmachine wrote:
| A message from the Skype CEO [NSFW]
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E
| qingcharles wrote:
| That was great :)
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Big corporations are usually super slow and clumsy in
| implementing anything new or doing any quick changes.
| ycuser2 wrote:
| MS was very quick with implementing LLMs everywhere.
| Clubber wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Teams is used quite a bit.
| ffsm8 wrote:
| _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Skype was perfect BEFORE the Microsoft acquisition.
| Everything afterwards was unnecessary. Source: I used Skype
| before and after 2011.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| msmsgs.exe was p2p. Came with Windows 98, possibly 95.
| Video, audio, text.
|
| Maybe microsoft forgot they made that?
| codedokode wrote:
| 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.
| x0x0 wrote:
| Right, but that architecture falls apart in a mobile-first
| world.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| The p2p part was relevant for the operators as Skype didn't
| need to run (and pay) their own servers to deal with the
| load, but some other user close by provided it for free,
| giving low latency all over the world.
|
| However with shift to mobile the patterns changed and less
| people ran it on desktops, thus less supernodes and the p2p
| approach had limitations (no group call) where solutions
| were needed.
| randerson wrote:
| Skype pre-acquisition had constant sync issues. I'd
| sometimes send a message that would only show up days
| later, or someone would call me and it would only ring on a
| different device. P2P was obviously cheaper for them to
| run, but it became far more stable after they introduced
| servers.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| Microsoft didn't miss their opportunity with COVID, teams user
| base grew by the millions
| StableAlkyne wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Remember, Teams was originally "Skype for Business".
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Digital cameras were mostly useless in the 80s and early 90s
| for rank and file consumers. The demand wasn't there.
| rchaud wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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...
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| 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.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| 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.
| globular-toast wrote:
| When did "consumer" become a word used by marketing? It's a
| technical term from economics and a role that is played by
| everyone at various points in their lives. Calling people
| "consumers" seems distasteful and I think betrays how Microsoft
| thinks about their customers. "Teams for Home" would have been a
| much more obvious and nice name.
| esafak wrote:
| We should appreciate their honesty.
| puttycat wrote:
| WhatsApp is now the de-facto planetary telephone network. The
| only problem is that it can't call landlines unlike Skype. Is
| there a replacement for this specific functionality?
| robjan wrote:
| Usually Viber
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That has been one of WhatsApp's strengths, as it allows it to
| avoid spam calls.
| homebrewer wrote:
| My friends and relatives get spam calls every single day. I
| don't use WA so I've no personal experience.
| SXX wrote:
| Well this is really sucks. What other cheap and reliable real-
| phone calling services are there with working CallerID?
|
| Calling to airlines, banks and other institutions is still needed
| and I still use Skype for this from time to time.
| kleiba wrote:
| Teams is a heavyweight behemoth with awful UX while Skype
| orginally had a very lightweight feel to it. Of course, Microsoft
| had to kill that through various UI "improvements".
|
| Also, Skype has an official Linux client.
|
| Instead of developing Teams (NIH at its best), they could have
| carefully developed Skype into a similar platform. But I'm not
| sure a giant like Microsoft is capable of something like this.
| But at least their 8.5bn investment wouldn't have been just to
| kill a competitor.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| >NIH at its best
|
| How do you know?
|
| Teams feel totally different from Skype, from design
| perspective
| bombcar wrote:
| Teams is just Skype for Business which was just rebranded
| Lync.
|
| They never were at all related to Skype which was based
| around p2p phone calls, not group chats or businesses.
| rchaud wrote:
| the design is a re-skin of Skype for Business. The app is way
| more bloated now, so there is an additional pane of options
| for things like team-only chats, task tracking etc
| moltopoco wrote:
| The award for the most absurd "UI improvement" must go to the
| Skype iPhone app that was painstakingly rewritten so that it
| felt like a Windows Phone app, complete with gestures that
| didn't make sense to iOS users:
| https://www.neowin.net/news/skype-for-ios-completely-redesig...
|
| It was actually technically impressive, just...why??
| g-mork wrote:
| Agonizing to see this, but not for any current love of Skype.
| Redesigns killed it, and so obviously at the time were going to
| kill it. Redesigns like this kill trust and familiarity in a
| product, eventually the Microsoft account upsell meant I could
| not even log in using my Skype username at one point. I'm a tech
| person, imagine a mom'n'pop suffering the same.
| rgovostes wrote:
| You can really tell they abandoned it by the lack of references
| to Copilot on the website.
| DanielHB wrote:
| Funny that written summaries of voice calls are actually a
| really useful feature. One of those easy wins of applying AI
| tech: unobtrusive and useful.
| palata wrote:
| Feels like Google never built anything successful themselves
| after the Search engine (maybe GMail), but rather bought stuff
| that became successful (e.g. Google Maps).
|
| Conversely, Microsoft has built successful products (Windows,
| Office, ...), but it feels like whenever they buy something, they
| break it. Remember Nokia?
|
| That's probably wrong, but it's how it feels to me now :).
| kome wrote:
| I have been using Skype to call my parents every week for the
| last 15 years... and i still do. It works!
| Macha wrote:
| Oh, that will be hard for my grandparents and some overseas
| family members. Someone managed to teach them Skype at great
| effort some years ago and it's still the main they use for video
| calling to see their grandkids. Probably will need to try teach
| them Google Meet or something instead, but they're not the most
| receptive to new tech.
| doublerabbit wrote:
| Jitsi Meet.
|
| My elderly mother uses it easy with the app on iPhone.
|
| Minimal effort to join a conversations and supports all
| devices. Secure E2E if you host it yourself and has most
| features of zoom.
| nottorp wrote:
| So the only option for ad hoc communication between groups of
| friends (as opposed to more formalized corporate communication)
| remains Discord?
| MaxGripe wrote:
| Literally every messaging platform Microsoft has ever created has
| always been terrible, and that remains true to this day. The only
| exception was Skype, which used to be good, but after Microsoft
| acquired it, it also became terrible.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| We use Skype to make long-distance calls to relatives who only
| have land lines. (For reasons, gifting the relative an Internet-
| connected device and just using FaceTime is NOT an option).
|
| I wonder what we will use once Skype shuts down - Google voice is
| also not an option (they stopped wanting our money years ago).
| moomin wrote:
| After 14 years of neglect, I still prefer it to Teams.
| axelthegerman wrote:
| Just waiting for an OSS Skype clone built on alternative
| infrastructure such as Twilio or jitsi meet under the hood haha
|
| Honestly though, I'll miss the 2ct/min calls to pretty much any
| landline in foreign countries
| polskibus wrote:
| Isn't Teams running on Skype at least in some part ? I noticed
| that sometimes teams urls or copied data from Teams contain Skype
| word.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Yes, this is correct (AFAIK). I think they basically bought
| Skype to build "Skype Spaces" which is basically Teams.
|
| See the auth flow here: https://github.com/fossteams/teams-
| api/blob/master/notes/log...
|
| They have a "Skype Spaces" JWT that's being used for some parts
| of Teams
| dkyc wrote:
| It's valid to think of this as Microsoft sort of squandering a
| unique opportunity to become the ubiquitous video conferencing
| standard by not investing in Skype, back when it had a market-
| leading position. Another way to look at this is that even though
| they bungled this, they _still managed to become that solution_
| through Teams. Even though they failed to compete with Skype, got
| leapfrogged by Slack, and then again by Zoom, they still manage
| to come out on top, at least in corporate America.
|
| You can argue that _they could have been Zoom, too_ , but looking
| at Zoom's 22bn market capitalization I don't think Microsoft
| sheds many tears about that thought. It's more a testament to the
| incredible market power and distribution muscle Microsoft has,
| that they can afford this many bad decisions and still win in a
| way.
| orev wrote:
| The way Microsoft "won" with Teams was through monopolistic
| bundling it into Windows and Office. To this day most people
| don't like using Teams for chat, but because it's there by
| default there's not a good reason to go through the hassle of
| bringing on another product.
| basisword wrote:
| >> To this day most people don't like using Teams for chat
|
| People will say the same thing about Slack, email, and any
| other messaging system they are forced to use. People love to
| complain, especially if they're coming to a product after
| using a different one at a previous job.
| strunz wrote:
| They gained it back by basically giving Teams away for free and
| getting companies to say "we're already paying for this bundle,
| so let's stop paying for Zoom/Slack." They still missed out on
| billions which they'll try to claim back over years of slow
| price raises (until the competition lowers prices and/or
| becomes more competitive).
| jpeeler wrote:
| I just installed Skype this week to talk to someone using Skype's
| translation feature. And it mostly worked okay too. Any
| recommendations for other products that can do real time
| translation decently well for free?
|
| Related, I've found it difficult to also find a good phone app
| for handling in person interaction. Google translate is awkward
| to use with its requirement to specify the direction of the
| language and being geared towards shorter phrases rather than an
| entire continuous conversation.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| I remember Skype being a big malware vector, and did my best to
| avoid. I do think MSFT cleaned this up, but the brand was ruined
| for me.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| What's disappointing about it to me is that Skype has been my
| "mobile" telephone for more than 10 years. Upstate NY has cell
| phone dead spots in it bigger than some European countries but go
| to a gas station with a tablet and Skype and it works great.
| apatheticonion wrote:
| I still use Skype to do international calls to my bank/tax
| office/government agencies when I am overseas. It's been
| indispensable, though their new model of buying a subscription
| rather than just having phone credits sucks
| alex1138 wrote:
| One thing that's really fun is getting inundated with spam from
| random accounts
|
| "user sent Translation Request"
| signa11 wrote:
| perhaps they can open-source it for great good ?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| What will happen to user's existing Skype credit?
| tverbeure wrote:
| Well, that sucks.
|
| I still use Skype whenever I'm calling internationally to my
| mother's land line. I still have $9 in credits.
|
| Skype is also a life saver when you're abroad and need to call a
| US 1-800 number.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Or in my experience, testing out some slight mis-dial 1-800
| numbers to see what kind of fraud they take me to without it
| linking back to me).
|
| It's fun: take the number on the back of your credit card or an
| airline and see what happens when you're a number off or dial
| 800 instead of 888.
|
| (How big companies manage to get an 888 number while someone
| else squats the 800 for fraud is beyond me).
| ohples wrote:
| Kinda hope they have a good way to migrate Skype numbers. I have
| one that I used sometimes when I don't want to give my real
| number. I have been meaning to look into alternatives. I think I
| can port it to some other provider, but haven't found one I
| liked.
| Timpy wrote:
| Back in the Windows 7 days I installed Skype on my parents
| computer before moving abroad, their user experience was
| basically like receiving a phone call. Even though they weren't
| tech savvy we never had any issues. I would call them, and if
| they were home and near the computer, they could answer it and
| we'd be video chatting.
|
| A year or so ago I found this to be impossible, there was no
| application for desktop that was as simple as receiving a phone
| call. My father has no smart phone. I sent him a zoom link via
| email but he couldn't log on to the family computer without
| getting blasted with UI updates, terms of service changes, "Do
| you want to use OneDrive?", "Here's what's new in Chrome", "Try
| asking Copilot anything!", etc. From his perspective the computer
| never worked the same way twice. I wish we had regulations that
| prevented buying out competition.
| falcor84 wrote:
| On a related note, a bit over a decade ago I had installed
| logmein on my parents' computer to be able to easily help them
| with any IT issues. But they since pivoted away from personal
| accounts and I never found anything else as straightforward. I
| feel that in a lot of ways tech has regressed.
|
| EDIT: I just found that logmein actually offer a personal
| product again, named GoToMyPC, but what used to be entirely
| free at the time, is now priced at $35/month.
|
| [0] https://get.gotomypc.com/plansandpricing#feature-list
| einsteinx2 wrote:
| Have you tried AnyDesk? It's free for personal use and I
| think does what you're looking for.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| I use TeamViewer for remote support
| mastax wrote:
| If you have a decent connection I find just using Windows
| Remote Desktop (RDP) over VPN (Tailscale) works really well.
|
| The value prop for the proprietary services like TeamViewer
| for me is they work much better over poor connections and
| cross platform. (Are there any decent RDP servers for
| Mac/Linux? In any case it's another thing to have to
| install.)
| ccozan wrote:
| Windows has a built in app for remote servicing called
| QuickAssist. Works perfect, no need to install anything.
| Lammy wrote:
| > I just found that logmein actually offer a personal product
| again, named GoToMyPC
|
| I 'member this being advertized on TechTV back in The Day.
| It's interesting to see the focus on PDAs now that the
| product category is entirely dead: https://web.archive.org/we
| b/20031209031959/http://www.techtv...
|
| ...but didn't realize it's quite as old as it is (1998) and
| had never heard of "ExpertCity":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoToMyPC
| homebrewer wrote:
| Try RustDesk instead of a bunch of proprietary alternatives
| suggested by other posters. It uses H.264/H.265/VP9 depending
| on your hardware and network, and is very fast. It also lets
| you set up your own server, leaking no information to third
| parties, but that's optional.
| frereubu wrote:
| I know this is about Windows, but just in case any Mac users
| don't know, there's a default app called Screen Sharing (in
| Applications > Utilities) that lets you dial into any other
| Mac user's computer if you have their iCloud username,
| allowing you to both see and control their screen. It doesn't
| work 100% of the time - sometimes it requires a tweak on a
| wifi router on the other end - but it's saved me countless
| hours on unproductive phone calls while helping my mother
| with tech issues on her iMac.
| homebrewer wrote:
| Telegram does that and also has a native (as in C++/Qt) desktop
| client, unlike almost every other messenger.
| lxgr wrote:
| WhatsApp these days also has native clients for Windows and
| macOS (UWP and Catalyst, respectively). They don't yet have
| all the features of the Electron/web client, but are getting
| there, and at least on macOS, I much prefer the experience.
|
| Also, I wouldn't exactly call Qt native, unless you happen to
| be on KDE.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Exactly! This is a trend nowadays. Go to web - they even make
| apps for it, just to put you to that webpage - then do some or
| all of [1].
|
| Unusable!
|
| About Skype: Once upon a time I had a phonecall with my then
| almost 70 retired mother from abroad, who never been a tech-
| savvy person, to be gentle, saying we should try Skype for its
| video chat, better sound and its no/low cost. I will install it
| next time being home. Next day she called me on Skype! She used
| the link I sent (she is not speaking English btw.), installed,
| configured, looked me up and called me out of the blue. Did not
| happen similar before or ever since. Soon, I will have trouble
| getting through the typical user experience, well, more like
| not giving an f getting through it.
|
| [1]
| https://img.ifunny.co/images/5e047ed0fb02df4c206c9d836ed21c8...
|
| And in [1] they missed the "Try closing the 'Disable ad-blocker
| plugin' pop-up"
| hbn wrote:
| Do they not want to use a smartphone?
|
| FaceTime is about as seamless an experience as you can get, and
| it's basically like receiving a phone call because it's indeed
| a call on a phone!
| Pavilion2095 wrote:
| /me cires in Estonian
| greatgib wrote:
| I can understand this decision because even my own Skype account
| is a ghost town unopened for few months.
|
| But it is really a giant asshole move to close that in only 2
| months when the thing has existed for so many years and you are a
| big company and not bankrupt!!
|
| You might easily be caught by surprise (as I discovered that here
| and not even in the app) and lose valuable old conversations or
| contact info.
| timothygold wrote:
| I'm surprised see Microsoft buying a competitor to only then shut
| them down at a later date. It's not like them at all to act like
| a Monopoly.
| jeffwask wrote:
| You had me there for a second. :)
| cratermoon wrote:
| You'll get nothing that works and like it!
| lawgimenez wrote:
| I'm still bitter with Microsoft shutting down Wunderlist.
| addicted wrote:
| How does MS ToDo compare to Wunderlist.
|
| It's supposed to be the successor developed by the same team.
| Reefersleep wrote:
| Ticktick was the closest approximation at the time of
| Wunderlist shutdown. Still solid, but haven't researched the
| market recently. I don't remember details about the Microsoft
| version except it wasn't good enough.
| lukaslalinsky wrote:
| I highly recommend ticktick to anyone looking good tasks
| manager. It's one of those very few apps that just doesn't
| disappoint me and even though I have ADHD and hard time
| sticking to some system, I always come back ticktick.
| duxup wrote:
| From my experience:
|
| Skype was pretty neat but always imperfect and throughout its
| history, including the Microsoft purchase, it just never could
| get out of its own way as a clunky piece of software.
|
| In many ways it reminds me of the awkwardness and clumsiness of
| Teams, with the exception that Skype never managed to capture the
| enterprise market.
| klausa wrote:
| >Microsoft will honor existing Skype credits, but it will no
| longer offer new customers access to paid Skype features that
| allow you to make or receive international and domestic calls.
|
| This sucks for me; I used Skype for this regularly for dealing
| with paperwork/banks/etc back in my home country.
|
| What do people use instead?
|
| I know there's probably a bajillion of fly-by-night operations
| that offer this, but given that whenever I have to use an actual
| _phone_, I'm probably dealing with a bank, the tax office or some
| other governmental entity -- I'd prefer something where I'm not
| worried about my calls being intercepted.
| magamig wrote:
| I've started using Viber, but it's full of ads and more
| expensive
| gigel82 wrote:
| Teams for consumers / home / whatever they're calling it doesn't
| even support audio calls or video calls (not even 1:1). It can
| literally only do text chats.
|
| I'm not sure what Microsoft is doing here, except admitting they
| don't care at all about the consumer market (except to advertise
| to / data mine).
| soundnote wrote:
| It definitely supports both audio and video calls.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| What happened? It's kind of hard to fuck up a chat app. The Skype
| ring tone is iconic.
| grandpoobah wrote:
| Don't forget MSN Messenger was discontinued/merged into Skype.
| So they fucked it not once, but twice. Literally handed over
| their dominant position in instant messaging for nothing.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| Wait - what about MS Lync/Office Communicator? I don't
| remember if that was just a branding change of "MSN Messenger
| for Business" about the time right before the Skype
| acquisition, or folding in (and failing with) yet another
| IM/Video chat solution. So should the count actually be
| three?
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| That's Teams. MS Lync was rebranded as "Skype for Business"
| which was then rebranded as Teams.
| sjm-lbm wrote:
| Yeah, it's actually three, though only from a branding
| perspective. They did rebrand Lync/Office Communicator as
| "Skype for Business" for a bit, though I don't think there
| was ever any code shared and it was just a branding thing.
|
| Honestly I think they simply don't care, and from their
| perspective they finally have gotten it right with Teams.
| akgoel wrote:
| It was a p2p phone and video call app that Microsoft purchased
| when mobile phones started to take off. Phones cannot
| participate in a p2p network the same way a desktop can, so it
| had to be re-architected to use central servers, and they never
| got it to work the same after that.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Wonder if P2P networking is hindered by the hardware back
| then vs now. I can imagine now most phones could deal with
| P2P networking just fine.
|
| Software wise though idk if there is limitations baked into
| iOS and Android that limit this
| wccrawford wrote:
| I vaguely remember they making unusable in some situation that
| many people wanted, and people drifted away from it.
|
| Combined with not advertising it _at all_ recently, and other
| services taking the spotlight ( "Let's facetime!"), I'm not
| surprised that people have largely stopped using it.
| epolanski wrote:
| It's quite interesting that despite chat and video messaging
| apps being those that should stick for long they actually tend
| to be replaced with relative ease.
|
| Since I started my online journey I've been through ICQ, IRC,
| MSN, Skype, Hangouts, Kik, Teams, Telegram, Whatsapp, and many
| many others I don't even remember.
|
| Yet at every point it seems that something breaks, they feel
| like they have to add more and more features, core features
| start sucking, etc.
|
| Whatsapp is the only one that stuck since I started using it,
| and I suspect part of the reason is both the fact my friends
| and relatives just won't move from it (it essentially replaced
| SMS) and the fact that Whatsapp cares a lot about the client
| being very performing even on lowest end old devices.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Another Ars [dupe]
| Oarch wrote:
| It's Teams now isn't it? Some of the links generated by teams
| still have the word Skype in them.
| bilekas wrote:
| I'm not 100% sure but I suspect the canibalised the skype
| protocol in some capacity for Teams.
| ziml77 wrote:
| As far as I know, Teams evolved from their business product.
| Which went through multiple rebrands in a short time span,
| including Skype for Business.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| Teams was "Skype for business" which besides branding had
| little to do with Skype.
| basisword wrote:
| This is such great news. I had to communicate with clients and in
| some European countries Skype is expected. It's used for group
| instant messaging and it is awful compared to Slack/Teams. These
| users absolutely refuse to move off it so glad to hear they will
| have no choice. Skype sucked 10 years ago. With the vast array of
| better options available it sucks immeasurably more now.
| legitster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| And Skype had to maintain compatibility with many of these
| services that came and went.
| iLoveOncall wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I have. Skype was very popular in many places around the
| world.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| This Joel on Software blog post is now 25 years old,
| 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.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| So the answer can change over time. You have to
| periodically re-assess the benefits of a rewrite.
| codedokode wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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-...
| paulddraper wrote:
| Skype is 20 years old.
|
| Tech has advanced enormously in that time.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sell the brand to Signal
| TiredOfLife wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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!
| lxgr wrote:
| 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...
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| Great. Really not looking forward to helping my grandmother
| migrate, and possibly a bunch of her friends.
| evanjrowley wrote:
| "Embrace, extend, extinguish"
| margalabargala wrote:
| Considering that Microsoft has owned Skype for 14 years of its
| 22 year lifespan, I don't think that this applies here.
| Insanity wrote:
| Long time coming. The only one in my social group who still used
| it was my wife - and just for the function to call regular
| phones. Calling family in the US/MX from EU was pretty cheap with
| the Skype credit option.
| linwangg wrote:
| I still use Skype, mainly out of habit, but I guess it's finally
| time to move on. Telegram seems like the best alternative for me,
| but I wonder--what are others switching to? Feels like every few
| years, we have to migrate to a new chat platform.
| concerndc1tizen wrote:
| Telegram requires permission to view all your contacts on iOS
| :)
|
| So I refuse to use it now.
| linwangg wrote:
| That's fair, but almost every messaging app does this
| (WhatsApp, Signal, iMessage, etc.). The question is: do you
| trust Telegram more or less than the alternatives?
| Personally, I see it as the lesser evil compared to some big
| tech options.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| WhatsApp doesn't require contact permissions to work.
| Neither do other apps I use for messaging like Facebook
| Messenger, Instagram, or Snapchat.
|
| iMessage sort of does, but that's only because it's more a
| part of the OS, which already has your contacts anyway.
| doublepg23 wrote:
| I find telegram is amazing for meeting people you don't already
| know, especially in group chats or for having slightly more
| anonymity.
|
| Signal is great if you already know everyone you're talking
| with and don't really care for large group chats (100s of
| anonymous strangers).
| lbourdages wrote:
| Anyone knows of an alternative to Skype to make free calls to
| 1-800 numbers? I was keeping Skype in my back pocket during trips
| abroad for that exact reason (allowed me to get away with using
| data only eSIMs and still be able to call bank/airline if
| something happens).
| pcl wrote:
| Google Voice is pretty cheap for that use case.
| lbourdages wrote:
| Not available in Canada sadly.
| bloomingkales wrote:
| It's not free but you can try the Burner app.
| asah wrote:
| if you don't call 800-numbers often, it's a tiny economic
| cost...
| jesterson wrote:
| This. And most importantly for me, Skype allowed to call using
| my numbers (for bank it will look like i am calling from my
| cell). Any other voip service would just put random number
| which will trigger additional security checks.
|
| Would love to hear about service doing that
| jalk wrote:
| My banks mobile app has a Call Helpdesk button, which simply
| dials the support number with ',,,<long random number>'
| appended. That gets you into the fast-track queue and they
| don't need to ask any security questions as they know it's
| you. They don't look at the dialing number at all.
| smjburton wrote:
| Another option you could look into is a mobile VoIP app like
| Acrobits Softphone or Groundwire with a VoIP SIP provider like
| voip.ms. The apps are a one-time purchase (~$6.99-9.99 last
| time I checked). Toll-free calls are free and the airtime from
| voip.ms is incredibly cheap (local calls start at $0.01/min).
| ACS_Solver wrote:
| I'm still using it after starting on one of the early Skype
| versions. At over 20 years, it's lasted me longer than ICQ, IRC
| or an other messenger. Most of my contacts no longer use Skype
| but it's the primary way I contact my family and I can't think of
| an obvious replacement that would fully satisfy my use case.
| WinstonSmith84 wrote:
| hopefully next is Teams. Microsoft gave up building browser
| engine and for everyone's sanity they shall also try to stop
| building chat applications. Arguably Slack has its issues, but
| it's a world apart in terms of usability, UX, UI, etc.
| dvh wrote:
| How will I check if my mic is working now?
| jjice wrote:
| I assume this was a joke, but if you do want an actual way, I
| always used Audacity for audio tests.
|
| https://www.audacityteam.org/
| ascorbic wrote:
| zoom.us/test
| whatever1 wrote:
| Are there any reliable alternatives for international
| landline/mobile calls?
| LinuxBender wrote:
| Microsoft have not sent me an email about this. I still have $120
| credit on Skype and a Skype-In number. Curious if they will give
| the credit back to me.
|
| [Edit] My question was answered here [1].
|
| [1] - https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/2...
| tombert wrote:
| Damn, this is the primary way I talk to my parents and my
| grandmother.
|
| Genuine question, what do people here recommend as a replacement
| for non-technical people? I'll need to walk my grandmother
| through the process of setting something remotely.
|
| No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime is
| out, and I'd need something that can run on a computer. I suppose
| I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal desktop, but
| I was kind of hoping for something that gave you the "user is
| online" status thing like Skype does.
| sumitgt wrote:
| Why not just use something like Google Meet? You send a link
| and the other person just needs a browser.
|
| It's a pain to deal with syncing issues on Signal Desktop.
| jjice wrote:
| Google Duo (might be lumped in with Meet now) worked well for
| me when I was on Android and everyone around be was iOS. It's
| cross platform and worked out of the box.
|
| Discord probably has a bit more going on since it also has a
| community focus, but it may be worth looking into since it's a
| platform that won't be going away anytime soon. It also works
| from the browser if having them download something is a
| headache.
| darrylb42 wrote:
| Google Duo is gone. The functionality has moved to Meet,
| causing much confusion for non-technical users and annoyance
| for everyone.
| aaomidi wrote:
| I gave my grandmother an old iPad I had. It's been amazing.
|
| She's also in Iran, so it's one of the only services that
| somehow the govt doesn't target when killing video call apps.
| blakeashleyjr wrote:
| I would make the jump to Signal. It's super easy and secure.
| Has all the features you'd need (minus the online status). It's
| how I communicate with my whole family.
| tombert wrote:
| I use Signal, and I've gotten my parents to use it for
| texting as well, but I don't think that they have used Signal
| desktop.
|
| That's likely what we'll end up using since I've already
| onboarded my mom and my dad on this.
| randerson wrote:
| WhatsApp works well for most people and runs on any device.
|
| I gifted a MacBook, iPhone and Apple Watch to my elderly
| father, and I now use FaceTime. He came from a PC and is not
| technical, but he adapted fairly easily. (The fall detection
| feature on the watch gives us both some peace of mind.)
| paulddraper wrote:
| If your grandmother happens to have a Google account already,
| Google Hangouts. [1]
|
| Wouldn't need to set up anything. And works as reliably as
| anything I've seen.
|
| EDIT: Signal is a very HN recommendation for drop dead
| simplicity. Syncing keys?
|
| [1] https://hangouts.google.com
| tombert wrote:
| Actually I just realized my grandmother doesn't have a
| smartphone of any kind, so I think Signal is out regardless.
|
| I might see if I can just migrate her to the free Teams
| service from MS. It hurts me a little as an annoying Linux
| guy but I think this would be the easiest option.
| renata wrote:
| I mean, Signal works as TOFU if you're not sharing state
| secrets or anything.
| geocar wrote:
| > No one in my family but me has iPhones, so I think Facetime
| is out,
|
| So FaceTime lets you make a link that you can give to someone
| with a web browser and they can use it to reach you, and it
| works pretty well. You might just try it.
|
| > I suppose I'll have to talk my parents into installing Signal
| desktop, but I was kind of hoping for something that gave you
| the "user is online" status thing like Skype does.
|
| That's probably the biggest limitation: It's a webpage for
| calling _you_ (the person with the iPhone), not a page for you
| to call them. If you want them to open a app /page when they
| are available, I think Messenger is best in terms of features
| and usability.
|
| If your parents/grandmother aren't already on WhatsApp I don't
| think you should link their phone number (which might be linked
| to their banking etc) with a public chat system because there
| are a _lot_ of online scams targeting the elderly through
| WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram and linking to the mobile number
| associated with other (higher value) services. It is very easy
| to lock-down Messenger so nobody who isn't already a friend
| can't target them.
| tombert wrote:
| I was looking into it, and it looks like there's a free
| version of Teams. I think that might be the easiest to get
| them to onboard to simply I suspect it'll be easier to talk
| them into something with the "Microsoft" branding.
|
| I hadn't really thought about scams. I'll keep that in mind.
| paulddraper wrote:
| FaceTime requires the initiator have a Mac.
|
| Mac users can call others. Others cannot call Mac.
| tombert wrote:
| Yeah, and I don't have a Mac computer anymore, and neither
| do my parents or my grandmother.
|
| I coordinated with my parents, we're gonna try the free
| Teams thing.
| vinni2 wrote:
| My parents and grandparents are non techies and don't have a
| lot of experience but they can make whatsapp calls easily. It
| takes bit of getting used to though.
| kjsingh wrote:
| Whatsapp voice/video calls?
| kobalsky wrote:
| Been using Skype Manager to handle numbers for a few accounts in
| our business. I haven't found info if it will be possible to
| migrate these numbers to Teams. Does anyone have info about this?
| Juliate wrote:
| Will we ever have communication tools more durable and
| predictable (with known and managed failure modes and privacy
| expectations) than paper mail?
|
| Standardised protocol? independent of any single entity or
| subscription? readable without special technology? universal
| service infrastructure?
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| That is called email
| bee_rider wrote:
| Skype's peer-to-peer architecture seemed like an interesting
| idea. I mean that's the sort of thing the internet was supposed
| to facilitate, distributed communications.
|
| Of course MS screwed it up pretty quickly after buying it, and
| the name has been a mockery of it's former potential for much
| longer than it was an actual thing.
|
| RIP Skype, we never met you.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| I forgot about that. It used to create a lot of issues in a
| shared house I once lived in, we had a housemate who left Skype
| running and flooded our router with junk packets.
| Kapura wrote:
| Absolutely wild that the entire world got locked inside their
| homes and everybody became a remote worker and that wasn't enough
| for Skype or Teams to get used. Embarrassing! and this is the end
| result.
| zdragnar wrote:
| I used Teams through most of lockdown. The developers were all
| on macs, and used slack for chat, so the only feature of teams
| we used was for the daily stand-up video call.
|
| The desktop app ran very poorly on macs, and left everyone
| pretty much blaming it whenever their Mac acted up.
|
| I only used the website version myself, and it was fine, so I'm
| assuming there was just some hanky programming in an election
| wrapper that needed optimizing.
| orev wrote:
| They forgot Skype existed and everyone used Zoom. Then
| Microsoft scrambled and used their monopoly power in Windows to
| force Teams on everyone. Teams was not a thing until at least
| half a year into the pandemic.
| jjice wrote:
| Lots of good times on Skype in high school. Plenty of 12 hour
| calls on that service for free, and I really appreciate that it
| was a thing. It was really solid for the time. We had so much fun
| buying $10 of Skype credit when we finally were old enough to get
| jobs and then prank calling people over Skype. Very juvenile, but
| that's what we were.
|
| Thankfully, P2P calling and video calling in general is a solved
| problem now with web standards included. I'm glad Skype was there
| when it was.
| java-man wrote:
| Are they going to refund the existing credit?
| TuringNYC wrote:
| When Microsoft took it over, I lost the ability to log in.
| Despite having many paid credits on the system. There were
| numerous issues like -- you couldnt log in if you already had a
| microsoft account under the same email in some cases.
| yeyeyeyeyeyeyee wrote:
| That's unfortunate, I was still using as a cheaper option for
| international calls to landlines.
|
| Is there any good EU alternative for this specifically ?
| ascorbic wrote:
| I recently signed up for Vyke when I couldn't get Skype to work
| for international calls. Worked well for me.
| https://www.vyke.com/
| btown wrote:
| This reminds me of how Yahoo Messenger was silently a significant
| part of the oil trade, and its shutdown may have subtly made the
| industry more opaque:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/oil-traders-prepa...
|
| I have no doubt that we'll see stories about niche industries
| still built on the backs of Skype that are scrambling to adapt.
| Nowadays, I suppose it's likely a rounding error compared to
| other ways that geopolitical forces are disrupting various
| industries... but we should all be aware of the implicit
| commitment we make to users when releasing any B2C service, and
| how people will build entire livelihoods around the simplest of
| services in ways we can't anticipate.
| rnikander wrote:
| I just used Skype the other day. I still find it useful for
| certain things. Is it that these companies can't maintain a piece
| of software unless they see a way for it to grow and dominate the
| world?
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| There's the official post: https://www.microsoft.com/en-
| us/microsoft-365/blog/2025/02/2...
| logicallee wrote:
| if you're looking for an immediate alternative, the State of
| Utopia has just bootstrapped this p2p alternative using WebRTC.
| It supports voice, video, and chat and has no logging, recording,
| or analytics of any kind:
|
| http://taonexus.com/p2p-voice-video-chat.html
| pjs_ wrote:
| I liked it when they made all the lines wiggly
| foogazi wrote:
| Why not use AI to make Skype successful?
|
| Not adding AI, but have AI design, and execute the steps to turn
| Skype into a successful product
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| Is there a good alternative with high-bandwidth, high-quality
| video? I just tried Discord, Telegram, and Element - they all
| compress their video quite noticeably into a blurry mush.
| bombcar wrote:
| Zoom has some settings for HQ and "musician audio". But to
| really do it right you need something designed for recording
| high quality - like riverside.
| jdlyga wrote:
| Every time I'm forced to use Teams it's a chore. I was trying to
| find a way to set a virtual background or change camera settings,
| and it looks like it's only available right before you join a
| meeting. It's wild.
| sznio wrote:
| >I was trying to find a way to set a virtual background or
| change camera settings, and it looks like it's only available
| right before you join a meeting.
|
| Huh. I used Teams in 2020-2023 and back then you'd just hover
| over the enable/disable camera button and the settings would
| show up.
| sleepyfran wrote:
| It's not, you can do that under the video settings if you hover
| over the camera icon on the calling screen, or there's a device
| settings buried under the overflow menu as well. Haven't used
| Teams in a while, but I doubt it changed now.
| igorguerrero wrote:
| Oh man I actually use it to get a US phone number... What's a
| better alternative for this? I like skype cause you can request a
| new one every time you wanted.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| it's not as user friendly, but VoIP.ms is cheap and powerful.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| Skype was great, until M$ bought it, and then it was all
| downhill. For some reason they removed the ability to have a
| personalised answerphone message. Why?
|
| Any suggestions for an equivalent VOIP service? Something simple
| and cheap so I can have a phone number on my website that rings
| on my computer + has an answerphone for missed calls.
| ein0p wrote:
| Seems unwise. I'd at least try to sell it instead. It's a very
| popular brand still. You don't just "kill" things like that -
| brands are very difficult to build.
| orev wrote:
| The user base is what's valuable, and Microsoft wants them
| moving to Teams. Selling it would undermine that since they
| would lose the users.
| ein0p wrote:
| I don't think anyone would willingly move to that turd.
| Anyone who has to be on it is already on it.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Bring back CU-SeeMe! ;)
| qingcharles wrote:
| Looks like this is the address to export your chat history:
|
| https://go.skype.com/export
| codedokode wrote:
| New messengers are worse than old ones. You could sign up for
| Skype using just login and password and for modern messengers you
| need to provide at least a phone number, and if the trend
| continues tomorrow they will start requiring biometric data I
| assume.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| It's amazing to think that there was a time when Skype was
| literally synonymous with web-based calls and text chat. It was a
| verb, like googling. First eBay (was always a terrible fit), then
| Microsoft (which could have made it the defacto standard), lost
| the plot.
| quitit wrote:
| Microsoft has sent out this email:
|
| Dear Skype user,
|
| In order to streamline our consumer communications offerings, we
| will be retiring Skype in May 2025. As part of this change, we
| want to keep you informed about important updates to your Skype
| paid services and how these changes may affect you. Please read
| on for detailed information about the updates and what they mean
| for your services. Subscriptions & Automatic Top-Ups: Existing
| subscriptions will continue to automatically renew until April 3,
| 2025. After this, all subscriptions will be retired and no longer
| be available for purchase, renewal, or reactivation. Automatic
| top-ups will end on April 3, 2025.
|
| Skype Number: Your Skype Number subscription will continue to
| automatically renew until April 3, 2025 and will remain active
| until the end of your next renewal period. To port your Skype
| Number, please contact your new provider directly. Learn more
|
| Skype Manager: Skype Manager users can purchase and renew paid
| products, including automatic credit top-ups, until April 3,
| 2025. After this date, only existing credit balances can be
| allocated to group members for calling.
|
| For SMS services: SMS services will be discontinued on May 5,
| 2025.
|
| Skype Dial Pad: After May 5, 2025, the Skype Dial Pad will be
| available to remaining paid users from the Skype web portal and
| Teams, where you will continue to be able to use your
| subscription or Skype Credits.
|
| Terms of Use: Skype paid products are subject to the Microsoft
| Services Agreement.
|
| Thank you for being part of Skype
|
| We want to express our deepest gratitude for your support over
| the years. Skype has been an integral part of countless
| meaningful moments, and we are honored to have been part of your
| journey. Learn more about Skype retirement here.
|
| With gratitude, The Skype Team
| rwky wrote:
| Thanks for this I've not received the email yet. This bit is
| irritating
|
| >To port your Skype Number, please contact your new provider
| directly. Learn more
|
| Anyone got any recommendations on who to port to?
| dabinat wrote:
| I feel like I'm one of the few people still using Skype. I'm
| using the feature where you can rent an international local phone
| number and people can call you on that number and it forwards to
| your phone (my family live abroad).
|
| I've been looking and I'm struggling to find services with this
| feature that aren't 3x+ the price. Skype seems to be unique in
| that it's aimed at consumers and most of those other services
| seem to be aimed at businesses (that could be a factor in why it
| failed).
|
| Can anyone make any recommendations?
| zamadatix wrote:
| I don't have any recommendations. I used to have a number like
| this but it seems anything aimed at being cheap and for
| individuals ends up attracting a bunch of nefarious use for the
| volume of legitimate use which ends up making the service not
| worth running for the provider. As such, I gave up trying to
| find one to stick with.
| anter wrote:
| If you have some tech skills and want something truly cheap,
| set it up directly with twillio, they have a basic scripting
| thing that can allow you to forward calls and such (chatgpt can
| help there) and the numbers are at something like a dollar a
| month iirc.
| jimnotgym wrote:
| Killed Skype? Didn't it just merge into Teams?
| issafram wrote:
| I remember loving Skype before Microsoft bought it. I started
| using it very early on. It was amazing. I remember they had
| something like public groups (I forget the name). Think of it
| like a Twitter Space. I was in there every day.
|
| Some people might remember "his highness from India". Good times
| arguing and listen to others argue with him.
| upcoming-sesame wrote:
| I use Skype for online language classes. The good thing is that
| the chat window is persistent for the contact (unlike Google
| Meet). That means I can go back in history during a call and see
| the previous notes
| homebrewer wrote:
| I already mentioned it under another comment (so I probably
| look like a shill), but Telegram also has this functionality,
| all wrapped in a native (C++/Qt) and relatively efficient
| desktop client.
| mihaaly wrote:
| They bought it to murder anyway. Consciously or cluelessly, does
| not matter to me. It was so sad seeing it becoming that useless
| piece of junk not resembling the Skype grew to be the centerpiece
| and workhorse of my communications, business and personal alike
| in its prime time. I was mad about this incompetent giant ruining
| it little by little, sometimes with a big hit to its stomach. RIP
| Skype, years and years ago. Only nostalgy left it on my desktop,
| and two (one plus one) rare contacts. Everything dies, then rots
| away slowly, it was painful to see that for Skype it happened not
| in this order.
| bigpeopleareold wrote:
| My wife and I still use Skype, primarily for chat, but sometimes
| video calls. I had Skype Credits, but I don't really need that
| anymore. The service has definitely degraded (like it couldn't
| deliver text in a timely manner frequently), but we never
| switched because despite its faults, it was comfortable enough.
| No way in hell I am going to use that garbage Teams. I am stuck
| using it at work and loathe it. This motivates to find a Free
| Software alternative to this.
| joshvm wrote:
| Skype is still good as a video client, but where they really
| screwed up was chat history. The only way you can recover old
| messages is to infinite scroll until you get to the point you
| need. Search is largely useless.
|
| WhatsApp desktop is a perfectly usable alternative, and chat is
| good - you can save to a file, media is automatically backed up
| if you want.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Unfortunately, Skype was an easy way for people to easily call
| toll-free US and Canadian numbers while overseas for free.
|
| (E.g. need to call an American airline or rental car company
| while abroad).
|
| Sometimes the local numbers would cost you money to call (or were
| only available during business hours and in the middle of the
| night for you, it may be daytime hours in North America).
| user9999999999 wrote:
| Monopolies are holding back innovation in the US, and I think we
| will start seeing the affects of which in the next decade or so
| florbnit wrote:
| I honestly didn't even know Skype was still alive I'm surprised
| it's around to kill. MS Teams is so cemented in my own any anyone
| I knows world that it's funny to think back on the days where
| Skype was here and everyone hated it.
| r0ckarong wrote:
| I don't understand why killing a "brand" you own is so important.
| Just repackage the existing product you mean to keep around and
| call it something else. How many other industries are ruled by
| rebranded bullshit that does what they used to and now overcharge
| by factor X?
|
| Stop killing, make zombies work.
| squirrel6 wrote:
| Sure but since most of its components have been Frankensteined
| into MS Teams it lives on right?
| almostdeadguy wrote:
| RIP longmont potion castle
| lxgr wrote:
| Skype (the original product/service, before Microsoft's corporate
| hug of death) was an amazing piece of technology.
|
| It was pre-cloud in every aspect, not only using P2P for actual
| VoIP traffic but also for contact list management and node
| discovery (via DHT and promoting random people's PCs to act as
| core nodes! Opening up Wireshark on my laptop when on fast
| university Wi-Fi with a public, unfirewalled IP was quite the
| experience).
|
| It was also available _literally everywhere_ : Linux, the Sony
| PSP, Nokia's Linux-based "internet appliance/tablet" series,
| Symbian smartphones, cordless landline phones in some
| countries...
|
| I've long since moved on, but I do have some very fond memories
| of it being a lifeline to friends and family when backpacking and
| studying abroad in a time of horrendously expensive
| international/roaming calls.
|
| Rest in peace!
| Gualdrapo wrote:
| imho Skype wasn't the only huge opportunity Microsoft had to win
| space in the internet - and it wasn't only Messenger, but their
| social space they had along with it. In there you could post
| statuses (even with pictures!) and people could comment on those.
| Sound familiar...?
| eismcc wrote:
| It's strange to see Skype's lifecycle... I was in the MSN
| messenger team while the word "Skype" was whispered in the
| hallways and not taken seriously, to being bought, to dying.
|
| My main contribution to MSN messenger was working on the first
| unified synchronized video/audio experience - with flash ads!.
| It's fun to reflect on the progress over the last 20yrs in this
| space.
| buyucu wrote:
| Microsoft killed Skype years ago.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| How do you make phone calls then?
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