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How Microsoft Turned Consumers Against Skype

posted by Fnord666 on Monday May 14 2018, @07:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the because-Microsoft? dept.

canopic jug writes:

Bloomberg writes about how Microsoft turned consumers against a once popular brand, Skype. Before its sale in 2011, Skype was quite popular despite many shortcomings. After its purchase, existing shortcomings have been amplified and new ones added.

In March tech investor and commentator Om Malik summarized the negativity by tweeting that Skype was "a turd of the highest quality" and directing his ire at its owner. "Way to ruin Skype and its experience. I was forced to use it today, but never again."

Microsoft Corp. says the criticism is overblown and reflects, in part, people's grumpiness with software updates. There are also other factors undermining users' affection for an internet tool that 15 years ago introduced the idea of making calls online, radically resetting the telecommunications landscape in the process.

The purchase price was $8.5 billion USD, which will be hard to recover from Skype itself, so other factors must be at play but are not mentioned.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by NewNic on Monday May 14 2018, @09:27PM (3 children)

    by NewNic (6420) on Monday May 14 2018, @09:27PM (#679789) Journal

    Microsoft has released updated versions of Skype for Linux. They even host repositories so you can get your updates automatically.

    Of course, being Microsoft, they screwed things up a little while ago, pushing out updates that claimed to require newer versions of GLIBC than were available on the platforms they claimed to support. People reported that, if you forced the installation, Skype worked, so it did not actually need that newer version of GLIBC. Amazingly, Microsoft actually fixed this issue and pushed out a new version that didn't have the GLIBC foobar.

    I don't understand why they don't just make it work in a browser.

    --
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @10:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @10:26PM (#679799)

    I don't understand why they don't just make it work in a browser.

    It does work in a browser! You just have to download the browser and its associated node.js runtime.

  • (Score: 5, Funny) by BK on Monday May 14 2018, @11:08PM

    by BK (4868) on Monday May 14 2018, @11:08PM (#679814)

    Just to be clear, you're looking to have Microsoft make Skype work only in Edge? I guess that would be the final nail...

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @10:13AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @10:13AM (#680000)

    Have they started supporting Linux audio drivers again, or is audio still only for people on Windows and Potterix?