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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: 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"?