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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @07:46PM (9 children)
We have to use Skype for business at work. SSO never works, and even when it asks for credentials, that never seems to work either. The result is that no history of conversations ever gets saved. Additionally, it's always open, yet clicking on it takes many seconds to respond, with no indication that it is doing anything. Did I click on it? I don't know. Once you get it going I guess it's not too bad, but it is, indeed, a turd of an application. Years ago I used to say that Microsoft had crappy operating systems, but good applications. However, increasingly, Microsoft applications are starting to reek of diesel exhaust and fresh shit. The ubiquitous smell of the third world.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @07:52PM
That is, apart from the one saved at Camp Williams....
(Score: 4, Informative) by Booga1 on Monday May 14 2018, @09:04PM (4 children)
"Skype for Business" isn't the same software as regular Skype. It's a reskinned version of Lync, which was a reskinned/rebuilt version of Office Communicator R2. As bad as Skype for business is, it's better than the previous two incarnations.
Regular Skype has its own issues, not the least of which being the "Windows 10" version has stripped out almost every control setting you'd want in a program of this sort. You have to go find the "classic" installer to get something half-way usable. Of course, Microsoft makes that difficult to find as they want everyone on the "appified" version.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @09:13PM
Thanks for pointing out the difference between Skype for business and regular Skype. I did not know they were such vastly different products. It's still kind of the same problem though. Skype for business is so bad that I would never want to use regular Skype.
It's pure speculation on my part, but Microsoft's habit, in recent years, of buying software and trying to shoehorn it into their other products feels like desperation. Like 20 years ago when IBM bought Lotus, et al.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by forkazoo on Monday May 14 2018, @11:12PM (1 child)
If Microsoft had basically left Skype 2.x alone after the acquisition, they'd still have a competitive product in the marketplace today.
They really actively made the UI worse at every turn until I gave up on using it. At this point, I never even think of bothering to install it or log into it because nobody I need to talk to uses it anymore, either. I dunno why not fucking up a chat app is so hard -- Google seems inexplicably determined to kill Hangouts, so that it is competing on fair terms with Skype. I guess it's only sporting?
Then they confused the brand by making the not-at-all-skype (and not-at-all-compatible-with-skype) MS Office messenger (Not MSN Messenger... That's something else entirely. Sigh.) called Skype for Business, so you had to be really careful to specify what you meant when you referred to asking somebody to contact you on Skype. Making a decent chat app isn't that damn difficult. Corporate politics seems to make it almost impossible, despite the relative simplicity.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by requerdanos on Tuesday May 15 2018, @02:06AM
To be fair to Microsoft, this was necessary that Skype not make their UI choices throughout their modern OS experience look bad in comparison.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @09:44AM
Which just makes the whole thing even more stupid. Lync was often used in companies where installing Skype is a firing offense. What moron came up with the idea to rename Lync "Skype for business"?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Webweasel on Tuesday May 15 2018, @08:41AM (2 children)
Then your sysadmins are shit. We have rolled it out. SSO works for skype, outlook, o365 etc and custom apps. It never asks for credentials, conversation history is logged and emailed to you. It's fast to respond.
Your sysadmin has screwed up the federation service somehow, this is bad implementation rather than Microsofts fault.
Priyom.org Number stations, Russian Military radio. "You are a bad, bad man. Do you have any other virtues?"-Runaway1956
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @06:12PM (1 child)
Normally I would agree with you, but... have you actually seen the backend required for SfB? Its infrastructure is so overly complex that Microsoft doesn't even bother documenting each component's installation. They had to write a fucking configuration management tool just to manage an instant messenger backend! And of course that tool doesn't integrate with SCCM, so you'll always have to manage your Skype backend separately from the rest of the environment...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @09:13PM
And yet some sysadmins manage to do it properly. The initial assessment stands: your sysadmins are shite.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @07:47PM (2 children)
Microsoft has been growing ever more "enterprisey". Consumers and small-companies are being increasingly ignored because they are not seen as being profitable enough. Google seems to be slurping up the "smallbies" with Google Docs etc. and MS has given up on directly competing there, letting cash cows like MS-Office survive but linger. It's roughly comparable to Digital's VAX eating IBM's lower-end around 1980-ish. IBM just couldn't compete on mini-computers and mostly gave up.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @09:17PM (1 child)
I just said this in another post, MS reminds me of IBM 20 years ago, when they were desperately buying stuff like Lotus.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday May 15 2018, @01:09PM
Microsoft's best days are now clearly behind it.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Monday May 14 2018, @08:05PM (5 children)
Isn't this capitalism 101? Buy competition and tank their products so people are left with your products? That is unless you can buy a competitor and rebrand their product as your product or something similar.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday May 14 2018, @08:22PM (1 child)
Except the flaw in that ointment is Capitalism works around breakage, just like the the internet.
Capitalism isn't the problem here. It may be the solution.
Had Microsoft kept skype free, easy, reliable, and secure Microsoft would never have had any competition for Skype voice video and text messages.
Even without the secure part they would have owned the space. But that was never why Microsoft wanted into skype. They never had a business plan for skype, other than the NSA was willing to foot the entire bill. So Microsoft threw the users under the bus, and serves only government now.
As a result there are half a dozen things available, or coming out, that aren't within reach of the NSA, and do at least as good a job as Skype (because the bar was set so low).
Signal, Telegram, Tox, Silence, Threema, Conversations, there are lots of these. They all suffer from interoperability, but then so does skype, facechat hangouts. Having many makes it harder for the government to snoop.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 14 2018, @09:19PM
s/flaw in the ointment/fly in the ointment/
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Monday May 14 2018, @11:45PM
Looks like MS is practicing dumb capitalism: after they extinguish the bought product, they remain with no product of their own to sell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Kawumpa on Tuesday May 15 2018, @04:58AM
Normally yes, but what Microsoft really excels at is buying a competitor for shitloads of money and then tanking them without a working inhouse alternative. I don't really know what the strategy or aim behind this is apart from burning money and pissing off your userbase. Professor Christensen?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @10:03AM
Except they destroyed their own product (MSN Messenger) first.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by frojack on Monday May 14 2018, @08:07PM (4 children)
I still suspect that the CIA/NSA bought skype for Microsoft, just to get access. Ebay wasn't unwilling, just incompetent.
In 2009, the NSA was publicly offering [theregister.co.uk] to make any company who could get them into Skype encryption very rich.
Microsoft has NEVER been working for the end-users here, and might as well be an official arm of the US Government.
They don't have to recover a red cent. Its all funded by the Government which was desperate to get their hands on it.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by crafoo on Monday May 14 2018, @10:08PM (2 children)
We paid Microsoft billions to spy on us with our tax money. Yeah. You know, that sounds highly likely. We can pay to have our government spy on us without warrant, make a few people rich, and expand the Microsoft Brand all at the same time. I wonder, by what mechanism can the people drive a hard, solid wedge between corporations and government? It needs to happen.
(Score: 3, Informative) by c0lo on Monday May 14 2018, @11:52PM (1 child)
Too late for that, I'm afraid. You had a tiny chance with Benny Sanders to start driving that wedge - may or may not have happened on long term, but you didn't even start.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @09:59AM
Not just a tiny chance. Large enough to scare corporate America into making sure that nobody voted for Bernie Sanders, by pushing the only candidate who could lose to Donald Trump.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @01:34AM
Microsoft did away with [winaero.com] the peer-to-peer connectivity of Skype which was pretty telling. In other words, they have their little hands on all the traffic now.
The the UI is shitty, always hiding things. Over-simplification, maybe, I don't know.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday May 14 2018, @08:08PM (10 children)
There was once a time I used Skype.
It worked on Linux. I use Linux. My mother in law (at that time) used Ubuntu (now uses Chromebook).
It worked on Mac and Windows. Two other people (at that time) used Mac and Windows. (Now one of them has become an adult and after a few more years, moved out.)
It worked on everything we had and needed.
Then came Microsoft.
No More Linux !!! Don't you know Linux is a Cancer ?
So we moved to Google Hangouts.
It works on everything.
Any computer with a Chrome browser (and that's a lot).
Chromebooks.
Android devices, including very cheap children's tablets.
We had even once received a Hangouts video call from one of our young kindergarten age nieces, without the parent realizing it.
I didn't like Microsoft buying Skype. But I would probably still be using it if they didn't skrew it up -- which is difficult to imagine. And Microsoft did pooch screw Skype.
So I'd rather give my personal info to Google. Because, after all, Google isn't evil. I know this because Google says so. And Google wouldn't lie about that, because, Google isn't evil. After all, Google says they're not evil.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Monday May 14 2018, @08:29PM (3 children)
Given that you have resigned yourself to being spied on with every call, the wise choice is to go with what works, be nimble and capable of moving.
Sometimes old is new again.
The XMPP world is slowly adopting the OMEMO standard of end-to-end encryption of text, voice, and video.
(OTR works pretty well too, but its complicated to get working, not grandma friendly.).
OMEMO is opportunistic and pretty automatic.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday May 15 2018, @02:37AM
Speaking of the old, whatever happened to SIP phones, such as Linphone? Apparently, they're still around. See https://www.linphone.org [linphone.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @10:06AM
Too bad nobody ever made a serious attempt at an XMPP server for Windows. Every single one is some crap that needs a weird runtime installed (e.g. Eiffel), needs to be started manually through a BAT file, and usually configured via some text file.
Meanwhile, every third grader with Visual Studio community edition can make a hello world program that comes as an MSI file and installs as a Windows service.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 16 2018, @01:37PM
It's not just being spied on with every call. It's much better than that.
Conclusion, Google doesn't really do all that much spying, and really doesn't know very much about anyone.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by NewNic on Monday May 14 2018, @09:27PM (3 children)
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.
lib·er·tar·i·an·ism ˌlibərˈterēənizəm/ noun: Magical thinking that useful idiots mistake for serious political theory
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @10:26PM
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
Just to be clear, you're looking to have Microsoft make Skype work only in Edge? I guess that would be the final nail...
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 15 2018, @10:13AM
Have they started supporting Linux audio drivers again, or is audio still only for people on Windows and Potterix?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @10:22PM
Since the official Linux client was released, there has never not been a working Skype client for Linux. Heck, the old v4 Qt-based client (you know, the one which had all the features and actually worked) only EOLed last year.
(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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 14 2018, @08:31PM
Microsoft developed Office Communicator [wikipedia.org] on its own, before buying Skype. Later the software was renamed Lync, and it's now being called Skype for Business. It's incompatible with the consumer version of Skype.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 14 2018, @09:14PM
But the next major release after that often crashed. Like a whole lotta crashes.
Happily I read the most-negative reviews before upgrading, so I didn't upgrade.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Monday May 14 2018, @09:17PM
Not a whole lot, only when I want to chat with my coworker in Taiwan.
On my own time I use Facebook Messenger. It works really well, even for video calls to the Philippines.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by splenolymph on Monday May 14 2018, @09:18PM
After about a decade of polishing their legacy interface (which worked and was understandable), they threw it all away with a new design team. And forced everyone to upgrade.
This rendered the application impossible to use for seniors and just painful and awful to use for younger types.
I've seen my mother CRY after trying to use it.
She's switched to whatsapp now. It's just a much better experience.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Entropy on Monday May 14 2018, @10:34PM (1 child)
First thing Microsoft did was ruin the encryption.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday May 15 2018, @01:14PM
The first thing you do is what is most profitable. Then you work on things which are less profitable.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(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.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday May 15 2018, @03:59PM
MSN Messenger had a brilliant image-sharing feature. You could send a set of images to a friend and you could browse them like an album. You could slave yourself to their view or vice versa, or browse by yourself. I expect someone else has something similar but why they didn't think to keep that feature, or something more useful than slapping an image in the middle of a conversation, I don't know.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk