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Microsoft Working On Skype Teams, Its Slack Competitor (mspoweruser.com)
Earlier this year, we heard rumors that Microsoft was interested in purchasing the popular team-chat app Slack for as much as $8 billion. The deal never happened, so naturally, Microsoft has decided to make a Slack-like app. Microsoft-centric news blog MSPowerUser reports: Meet Skype Teams. Skype Teams is going to be Microsoft's take on messaging apps for teams. Skype Teams will include a lot of similar features which you'll find on Slack. For example, Skype Teams will allow you to chat in different groups within a team, also known as "channels". Additionally, users will be able to talk to each other via Direct Messages on Skype Teams. Skype Teams will also feature Threaded Conversations, which is a major feature that's lacking on Slack. With Threaded Conversations, you can simply reply to a message on a channel by clicking on the reply button and anyone else can join the thread whenever they want -- just like Facebook Comments, or Disqus Comments. Microsoft, of course, isn't leaving out some of the core features of Skype on Skype Teams. Similar to Skype itself, teams will be able to make video calls in a channel or privately. To take this even further, the company is adding the ability to schedule online meetings, which can be quite useful for large teams.
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Slack is already pretty established and so I would think Microsoft would have a hard time here...
Except that Slack still doesn't support group (or any) video.
Not that Skype video was all that great, and I fear for the quality of group video there... but something is better than nothing (or at least probably better than Hangouts which some teams I've been on used).
Slack needs a kick in the balls to improve so I'm glad someone has come along to do the kicking.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
No thank you. Between their wanktastic Lync/Skype For Business product, butchering Skype, their barely functional netmeeting, and their original Access product that was so terrible that they gave up and re-used the name for their equally bad database product, Microsoft has a long and cherished history of putting out collaboration software that makes fingerpainting in a bucket filled with phlegm, vomit, and diarrhea, a viable alternative.
I'll stick with Slack, TYVM.
Microsoft, of course, isn't leaving out some of the core features of Skype on Skype Teams.
Like NSA back doors. For your safety, of course.
IRC had this 30 years ago.
"Those who do not understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it. Poorly." comes to mind, i.e. "Reinventing the square wheel", a well known sign how Microsoft performs business decisions. Does not invent, just makes poor implementations of other existing inventions, then pushed out with windows as a critical non-stoppable update (as Skype was).
Look at the MS smart phone for another example. Does it has 0.1% market share still? Late to market, and poorly implemented.
There's already "Skype for Work", why is a third parallel implementation of a sucky app needed? Fix the first two instead! _Do one thing an do it well_
Well, it's a pretty good replacement for IRC, which was designed more like 30 years ago, so I'll take it. Having worked at places that coordinated using IRC this is much much better.
I guess people were right that when MS buys up a company chances are it might be where that company goes to DIE. If any product they acquired should be integrated with Skype to compete with Slack it should be Yammer...but I didn't hear a peep about that..
Microsoft is a black hole of corporate profits, where on one end it sucks in billions of dollars of profit from businesses established decades ago and on the other end where nothing comes out except darkness, silence, and failure.
In the time since Microsoft has taken over Skype, the app has grown in size and appears to have slightly better picture/sound quality.
Now that they have free reign to add all the buzzword features, it will soon grow in size to one petabyte. At that point, Microsoft will make Windows a service within Skype, and run it all on Linux, completely confounding us all as their maniacal laughter rings out in the grottoes and caverns where they worship dark evil gods.
Alternative Right.
Quantity: we need a new app!
Quality: let us improve the existing app!
I'd rather just improve IRC.
Alternative Right.
How 'bout first unfuck Skype, then unfuck OCS/Lync, then build an unfucked bridge between them both, and then, if it's ever working, start building new shit (to fuck up again)...?!?!?
We still use Skype for DM, but all voice chat now goes over Discord as Skype had a habit of throwing us out of full screen when people joined/left the conversation. We are fairly casual gamers and form groups based on whoever is online, so it's not unusual for someone to join late or leave early. Also you can easily adjust volume per participant, which lets you decide your own mix if someone is being loud or quiet or talking too close/far from the mic. Otherwise the sound quality has been pretty equal and we pretty much never close connection, so it's not like Skype is bad... but it's not the best.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Looks like... Discord.
Slack is actually a reasonably useable modern version of IRC without having to load a shit ton of bots and plugins, but where it wins is it's ability to integrate with so many other services, such as ScreenHero, Jenkins, JIRA, etc.
There's probably Slack integrations for most of the other tools you're already using, and it's a few clicks on some web pages rather than hours of installing bots or screwing around with conf files - this is where Slack becomes more than just IRC.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
Wasn't Yammer supposed to be a competitor for Slack? Didn't MS buy them just for that?
The current one is years and years old
It's September, and this product was supposed to be out this Summer...
Rocket.Chat and MatterMost come to mind.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
Brahmin MBA.
They don't come any dumber.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Damn great, and love that I can use IRC clients since it his just IRC
Twinstiq, game news
Skype as an IM app has been awful for around 13 years. I'm just too familiar with the spinning skype wheel of death to take this seriously. Most other IM apps (such as Slack or HipChat)... you know... let you chat... and they do it consistently!
Everyone I know of, has problems with skype, they images aren't delivered, changed messages, stay in waiting mode... It used to work fine, with V3, and every next version it became more ugly, and now every next it has more bugs...
https://fleep.io/chat
Let's just hope they don't buy Slack out and then 'integrate' it into their preexisting software like they do with everything else.