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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.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday May 14 2018, @11:22PM
11 years ago, I wrote a game for my kids that played a video in DVR style: question pops up on screen - upon getting a correct answer, a snippet of video plays as reward, then pauses and shows the next question: rinse-lather-repeat, for as long as you like. That was a simple thing to do, 11 years ago, on a specific platform with a specific format of video.
Since then, video tech has been mired in the abyssal plain where nobody with power wants it to work, nobody wants any guy with a computer and a little knowledge to be able to roll their own video apps. Little snippets of what is possible pop up here and there, but still, to this day, if you just want to get your hands on a raw video stream from a camera and put it down in a file with your own simple program calling an API, it's a mess. Much less put together your own video chat software without using somebody's lock-in, constantly evolving (breaking existing code) API.
Try QTox - it's a nice attempt at a video chat application, except that those people who are trying quite hard to make something work, still have issues with stability that just shouldn't be issues anymore.
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