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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @04:10AM
Before Microsoft bought it Skype was P2P and kinda encrypted and inconvenient for the NSA et all to snoop on.
Back then if you tried to send messages while your recipient was offline the message would actually be stuck on your client and only when both of you were next online at the same time would the message be sent. The message didn't go to some central server first. Heck if both of you were in the same country the message might not ever leave that country. This architecture probably made it too inconvenient for people trying to snoop on the communications.
So Microsoft was probably told to buy it and change it to make it easier to spy on: http://techrights.org/2012/08/02/skype-admissions/ [techrights.org]
Then they made it a huge stinking pile of shit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/LifeProTips/comments/27dihm/lpt_you_can_turn_off_the_annoying_skype_banner/ [reddit.com]
https://www.cnet.com/how-to/how-to-disable-ads-in-skype/ [cnet.com]
https://www.pcworld.com/article/2879646/solving-the-5-biggest-skype-annoyances.html [pcworld.com]
Then they got rid of MSN Messenger which was hugely popular (had crap default emoticons but allowed custom emoticons) and forced people to move to Skype or leave. Skype later got custom emoticons/GIFs etc but who cares.
Maybe some people in Microsoft didn't like the NSA using Microsoft to spy on people and intentionally drove everyone away to hopefully safer platforms? ;)
I'm curious on what's going to happen to WhatsApp.