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Skype Users Slam Microsoft's Attempt To Infuse App With Social Media Magic (theregister.co.uk)
Last month Skype announced a major update to its messaging and video calling app. The update brought a visual revamp, as well as "social features" such as Highlights that were first introduced by Snapchat. At any rate, it turns out, people are not enjoying the update as much as Microsoft had hoped. From a report: Reviews of the Android and iOS versions of the app have been mostly terrible, and those posted to the Windows App Store have not been much better. Chief among the issues is that the redesign imagines Skype as a youth-oriented social media app along the lines of Instagram or Snapchat, rather than a staid business communications tool. "This new app is absolutely terrible," observes an individual posting to Google Play under the name Kulli Kelder. "Skype is mostly used by people for professional use or for connecting with friends far away. This looks as far from simple and professional as it can be. Skype does NOT need to be Snapchat
." The Skype team clearly has a different view of its work. "We think it's the best Skype we've ever built -- inside and out -- and it's been designed to make it easier for you to use for your everyday communications," the company said last month. A few individuals have expressed similar enthusiasm, but among those reviewing the most recent update, one-star ratings dominate. Of the 20 most-recent reviews posted to the iTunes App Store, 19 out of 20 award one star out of five. The other is two stars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Kin
a.k.a. "we haven't learned how to be hip with kids yet but darned if we're not going to keep trying"
for the better. Seriously. Change today means "making everything worse". Without exceptions.
Thats what happens when you use a proprietary app and protocol. Wah! Wah! Wah!
This is the problem with the entire structure of corporate America. We rely on businesses like Microsoft to provide us with tools like Skype. But the businesses don't really care about us, and they abandon us for more lucrative demographics.
Is that why Win10 has been popping up an advertising square for Skype on my laptop? Meh... Not interested.
They shut off all landline adapters using their Skype Number product last month...I was not happy to lose a service I had paid for half way though the year.
From my perspective Skype was starting to make major inroads into corporate networks to replace other video conferencing systems in addition to being what younger consumers used. It was fairly unobtrusive and cross-platform. Then MS had to buy them and change their focus. Now it's all about chasing the cool which MS was never good at doing.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I hate Microsoft because Microsoft sucks.
https://ring.cx/
Will $CURRENT_YEAR be the year of the Linux Desktop?
"And they probably redesigned the whole sick-bay too! I know engineers, they love to change things!"
-----
"Does the new medical facilities meet with your approval Bones?"
"They do not - it's like working in a damn computer center"
I think it's because change for good goes unnoticed. For example FitBit Charge HR 2. The design is much different from version 1, yet it is much better.
Probably the biggest failing here is not understanding what Skype is. The biggest problem is that the changes fundamentally redefine what Skype is; but Skype's users used it for what it was: simple video conferencing.
No, I will not work for your startup
I don't get this. People complain complain complain, use the product another day, week, month, year, and complain again. Rinse repeat... This is just like their politics. 10% approval ratings with a 95% reelection rate. And on top of that, this is truly a first world problem and why we have President Trump. It is pathological. Your society is mentally ill, and there's so much denial.
"We think it's the best Skype we've ever built..."
This statement may even be true, since it's coming from an MS employee. However, it still doesn't change the fact that Skype was better before the MS buyout.
Trying to do everything means you are good at nothing.
...Kill all the Marketing executives that fuck shit up instead.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
In the last month or so I've had three updates to apps that have been terrible
1. WeatherBug used to be the best weather app by far, but a recent upgrade made it unusable so I switched to weatherunderground
2. Hulu revamped their app with terrible Ux as a result. I now avoid Hulu unless I'm watching on my Tivo which has not updated yet (and I hope it won't).
3 Now skype.
Is this bad SW engineering or Sw engineers being forced into bad decisions by managers that don't get that Ux is not just about eye candy it's also about how easy it is for a user to achieve what they want to do with as little effort as possible. To me, at least, usability out weighs eye candy every time
Just uninstalled this garbage from my Android. Went to APKMirror, downloaded an older version, sideloaded it (Settings -> Security -> Unknown sources needs to be on for this.)
Skype is back to normal.
Went to Google App Store -> Settings -> Auto-update apps and turned it off.
Unless they change Skype back to normal this is the last version I will use and if it becomes unusable I will use a different app.
You can't handle the truth.
Some people are STUCK using Skype at their place of employment. There is no choice here.
On OS-X, if someone skypes you a link, you can't just click on it to open in safari. Now you have to copy and paste into a browser's address bar.
Why would they throw existing business and home users in the fire and crap up their successful application for tweens and teens?
Wait.... People use Skype?
I constantly see new businesses spend thousands on marketing themselves, and won't spend twenty fucking dollars to buy their own domain in order to avoid presenting a cheap Facebook@Gmail image.
You want a professional business-grade solution for video chat? Then get off your damn wallet and invest in a system specifically designed for such a purpose instead of jumping on the social media teat to suckle with all the other cheap-asses.
TL; DR - You get what you pay for.
Looks like the dev team for skype took the worst bits of facebook messenger, whatsapp, viber and snapchat, threw it in a mixer and produced one big shiny t*rd nugget!
And the phone. Never listened to those that had to use it. They thought they were priests. They thought they couldn't be fired. They were wrong. But, they're back!
so the skype for business (paid) app did not change?
...Skype does NOT need to be Snapchat ....
Obviously, Microsoft thinks it does. Microsoft is being left behind by the world of social media. So Microsoft wants to use Skype the same way they used Zune --- an attempt to play catch-up with the market leaders.
A "ring" at a CX domain?
Is it a firey red ring by chance, spread far and wide for all to see? ( no, i am under no circumstances being fooled into clicking that link! i been around here too long!)
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Skype has (had?) a major advantage that you don't get even if you spend millions on a "professional system": It's available everywhere and it's dead simple to use for everyone. Install, register, login, talk. Done. With the web client, you can even forget the install part. Also, since it's so omnipresent, in most cases you just need to exchange Skype screen names and add a contact into your already installed client.
Every "professional" video conferencing system I ever had the misfortune to use is awfully complicated and it might require your contact to install yet another piece of software that is decidedly more complex then Skype and might cost money to license. Sorry, but no thanks, until is is as easy as Skype and doesn't cost my contact a penny.
I don't care what anyone says, systemd is a huge improvement over Skype. Improvement right there, taste it, bro.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
"People complain complain complain"
YOU DON'T SAY
We use it at our company and are looking for something to replace it.
They got rid of the 'transfer call' feature a long time ago which sucked, but then recently they've removed the custom voicemail greeting feature.
Ya... what business would want to tell people important (You've reached..... our normal support hours are..... please let us know the following information....) info before they a message, how silly!
I used it briefly, and didn't see why it is that popular. I don't use video and audio. I still prefer IRC, ICQ, AIM, YIM, BBS, etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I mean, Microsoft fcuking up something is not news - it's what they are best at. Consider yourself middle-fingered, Microsoft - and, today, it is much more than just me saying so.
they should have called it Bing Plus then the people who need to rebel would flock to it unwittingly.
They are trying to make a huge differentiation between consumer Skype and "Skype for Business" (aka Lync). The people using consumer Skype as a business tool simply will not move away from it to SfB, because everyone hates SfB and consumer Skype works really well. The only option is to make the consumer Skype so unpalatable to use in a business environment that you "have to" move to SfB.
My 20-something galpal just let off a long litany of gripes about Skype into my ear just yesterday, so it's not just old 1960s model nerds like me that think the changes are complete dogsh*t. But it's by god got a whizzy new sine wave "i'm working on it" animation, so it must be good right? Idiots.
Someone needs fired for this.
You know what I wish Microsoft would do? Instead of implementing useless features like highlights, I wish they would improve call audio quality. Imagine if Skype used the Opus codec with a bit rate of 48 Kbps whenever possible. I would love it if near CD-quality voice calls were mainstream. Right now my friends and I use Mumble for getting CD-quality sound, but unfortunately it's not mainstream.
Even worse when they spend all that money and have a @gmail.com email address.
The last changes Microsoft made to Skype was a dead giveaway. You could see the plague of rotting zombie corpses walking along the freeway way ahead in the distance. Getting confirmation that you really do want to quit Skype and if you do, you won't be able to keep in contact with your friends. Built in advertising? Auto-startup on first power up?
Main reason for all of these, I guess, is that some people do use Skype as a form of Instant Messaging.
Change today means "making everything worse". Without exceptions.
Welcome to aging. With me it happened in my late 30s, but YMMV.
I used to wonder why old people were so grumpy all the time. Now I know.
Skype is on the decline since the founders sold it. ...
And since M$ bought it it is utter shit. Don't let me start about "skype for business", Lync or something it is called.
I slowly convert my friends to Telegram. And as soon as we have a good video chat app again, Skype will be dead.
I'm sick of that "tyranny of vendors"
The Skype team clearly has a different view of its work. "We think it's the best Skype we've ever built -- inside and out -- and it's been designed to make it easier for you to use for your everyday communications,"
The best I can say about developers who make statements like that is: "they are likely demented" otherwise they would know better.
(E.g. when I go offline with Skype on my iPad, my Mac goes offline, too!!!! How retarded is that?)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
They could have at least used less obscure domain name to not make people ask if that could be a scam site.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I'm so sick of that kind of talk. It isn't "because of aging", but because things are really made to be worse and worse.
You've never worked for a large corporation, have you? Any work-provided computing device is going to be locked down and you definitely aren't going to be allowed to install some software you downloaded off of the Internet.
YES! Finally somebody gets it. I don't really want anything that looks or acts more recent than about 1985 or so. Personally I'm still using a green-on-black CRT monitor and doing everything with the command line. Linux? Pshaw! Too new for my taste. I'm running a BSD Unix from 1980. I can't play games but by god it's OLD. My phone is an AT&T dial landline. My TV? A B&W 1959 Motorola. I'm driving a 1970 Ford Fairlane with a straight drive, 4 barrel carburetor, and drum brakes. Sure it doesn't have any safety features and only gets 18mpg but it's OLD, dammit, and OLD is what I want.
Use appear.in or slack instead. Slack for work coversations and appear.in for customer talks.
Yes, I work at a webhosting company, and it's amazing how many customers will get the absolute cheapest package. We're talking a $15 shared account when they really need their own server at a minimum, but even their own instance with a couple cores would be welcome.
They will pay this paltry sum to us every month, but open tickets and call us daily when their site goes down because they have no resources for their heavy theme and dozens of plugins on their wordpress site.
Yes, they could solve this and save the time on the phone or in chats or in tickets with us trying to do anything they can to make us make it work, which of course there is little we can do when their site gets traffic it can't handle.
You'd think they'd spend the $50 or so a month (how much is their cable or phone bill you wonder?) in order to not have any issues, but they are business people, so they'd rather be cheap and waste all their time trying to be cheap, even though it also hurts their business.
Ohhhh! Suffer the little children for an ugly interface! My god! You people are sick!
It's much better than talking through a boot. Just ask Maxwell Smart.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
So Microsoft finally commented:
We’re confident that as we continue to listen to users and provide updates to the app with new features and functionality, we’ll be able to keep improving the experience.
So the usual marketing blabla of "improving your experience". When, for crying out loud, is a company going to admit that they were wrong and going to reverse course??! Just for once, please. Just say "Oops, sorry. We hear you; here's the previous version." Now that would be really listening to your customers.
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
Not funny, clever or original in any way, shape or form.
Lets change it all and make it worse because we want more... The new Skype interface sucks and looks horrid and the same for Google news.
This is Skype and Microsoft we're talking about. The very first thing Microsoft did when they bought Skype was to change it to make it worse. They threw away the P2P functionality that gave users better privacy than other programs.
What kills me is that they changed their iconic ring tone.
Yeah, thanks, Obama.
Attaching social media to your skype calls means spying on your skype calls, you would be an idiot to not be pissed off and a marketdroid troll. Seriously are you people not paying attention, fuck Skyp, Skype is dead.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Could be worse, it could be Webex.
Actually, its just that everything M$ touches or tries to do turns to SHIT!!!
Skype 10
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Yeah that kind of post gets old after a while
I just ran the Windows classic desktop client and the MS App Store client side by side. They don't seem all that different to me. What exactly has brought about all this wrath? The summary just repeats how "terrible" it is, without giving any details except for adding a "highlights" feature. I've never used SnapChat, so I have no idea what features it might have borrowed from that app, or why they are so awful.
The Android client has never worked well, so no surprises there.
I worked at Skype at the time we made these changes.
The problem with P2P is that it doesn't work well on mobile devices.
That's because changes aren't singular. When something changes there's often many changes involved, however we tend to focus on the ones we find worse than the ones we find better.
There are changes for the better in everything we hate, even Windows 10 and the never stationary Google Maps have some fantastic changes, but we spend all of our energy focusing on the downsides. e.g. Would I happily roll back several versions of Maps to get the pre-material layout versions? Hell no, the traffic and incident notification system of the more recent versions is a godsend. Ideally we'd get to pick and chose what we like in each app, but that's never going to happen. Hell we can't even do that on OSes (other than Linux, errr except for Systemd).
Mind you I haven't tried Skype yet, so I'll reserve my right to complain about that later :-)
But aging, hence historical experience, makes you notice it more and more...
I can't count the number of "new" or "improved" software that is clearly feature-wise the same or inferior, and implementation-wise clearly inferior, to things from the 1990s.
I have to conclude their business model is simply "our market will be ignorant people".
So you got rid of a privacy feature in order to get voice chat functionality on a phone?
Sounds legit. It's about time we got the ability to use phones to talk to people!
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
By privacy you mean call quality that varied between excellent to dire at random points during a call such that we ultimately decided it was not viable for business use?
Also, going through a P2P network with a proprietary protocol with unknown vulnerabilities also meant that certain classes of business usage could not be placed on Skype
I have worked for people that are cheap just for cheap's sake. However, they are that way because they do not understand how much they actually pay for being cheap. However, non-business owning individuals are often the same way. They are so cheap they cut off their nose to spite their own face.
Greed is a problem for all of humanity, not just for business owners for it is greed that causes people to be so cheap they cheat themselves. It arises from human nature. Everyone seems to want something for nothing. Otherwise politicians would get nowhere telling people they are going to give them "free" stuff that those same people end up paying for with taxes.
"while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude." de Tocqueville
I heard the lawyer joke [what is 10 000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea?] for the first time in primary school, living behind "the Wall". I found it amusing but also a bit puzzling since lawyers were not so important for our lives back then. Thus, very quickly we transformed the joke to be about politicians. Now, there was something you could direct your anger at. Bloody communists!
But then, just a few years before the wall fell I read THGTG and learned about market people or rather about "a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes". That was hilarious but just as the lawyers thing it was a bit removed from my daily experience - there was no marketing or advertisement under communism. I remember thinking "is marketing that bad?"
Then the wall fell and I emigrated to live and work in the West. And finally understanding dawned...Douglas had found the core issue after all, although I would say "financiers" rather than "marketers". Cause the lawyers and the politicians are figureheads - the real power is in those that print the money and those that manipulate us to spend it on BS [quote G. Carlin - advertising sells you BS that you cannot afford that is overprized and do not work].
Share and Enjoy!
Also the fact it takes up tons of space and memory. It's an instant messaging program for fuck's sake! The only reason they ditched MSN is because Skype was better for pushing ads.
Discord. Set your Skype status to "I'm switching to Discord and uninstalling Skype, username is blahblahblah#1234" and then take to the Skype forums and repeatedly shill Discord until banned, then make a new account and do it again.
Yet, it's a watch that I can't change the time on?!?!?!?!?
Try traveling to other time zones and trying to get the damn FitBit to show the correct time.
Very funny, BUT:
Personally I'm still using a green-on-black CRT monitor: Yes, colour displays are better.
I'm running a BSD Unix from 1980: Modern software will have bug patches.
My phone is an AT&T dial landline: Actually, probably has better call quality than most cells:
My TV? A B&W 1959 Motorola: A large modern flat screen TV is beautiful to watch.
I'm driving a 1970 Ford Fairlane with a straight drive, 4 barrel carburetor, and drum brakes: New EFI engines are more fuel efficient and disc brakes cool more efficiently.
Look, each of your glib comments can be objectively assessed as to whether something is better or worse. The GP's comment about a lot of "new" software being "worse" is actually correct, a lot of it is worse.
Both my private and my company Skype account (on different machines, not used mixed) were flagged somehow (same week) and i can't recover without giving M$ my cell number (which i won't).
Have moved on to jabber.
> Just for once, please. Just say "Oops, sorry. We hear you; here's the previous version."
I don’t even need that; I’ve long since started archiving old iPhone apps in case an update gets worse. (So I’ll avoid iOS 11 as long as possible.) But this time Skype forced me to upgrade in order to connect; I’d settle for “you are now allowed to use the previous version.”
Did you just seriously censor "turd"?
Out of the pan and into the fire, I've quit Skype for good.
I frankly trust the big G more than M$.
Guess we have to pick our poison
I use Skype desktop version for text chat at work, and I think it breaks many of the most basic rules of UI design. These rules have been known about for decades, and often promoted by Microsoft as the "right way" to write Windows apps.
There are two very simple options that have been requested many times on the Skype forums over the past 2-3 years: change the color scheme, remove the speech bubbles.
Here's all my rants condensed into one page: http://moteprime.org/article.p...
It looks like the new Skype is continuing that trend.
Sean Ellis
Follow OfQuack's antics on Twitter.
Skype has (had?) a major advantage that you don't get even if you spend millions on a "professional system": It's available everywhere and it's dead simple to use for everyone. Install, register, login, talk. Done. With the web client, you can even forget the install part. Also, since it's so omnipresent, in most cases you just need to exchange Skype screen names and add a contact into your already installed client.
Every "professional" video conferencing system I ever had the misfortune to use is awfully complicated and it might require your contact to install yet another piece of software that is decidedly more complex then Skype and might cost money to license. Sorry, but no thanks, until is is as easy as Skype and doesn't cost my contact a penny.
Facebook is available everywhere and is dead simple to use. That doesn't make it a "professional" solution by any means. It just makes it easier for anyone from the IT pro to the consumer-grade idiot to install and use.
I've worked with a lot of VTC systems in multiple network configurations for over 20 years. Standard protocols were established long ago, and they could all talk to each other quite easily because of that standardization. You want to talk simple? Before Skype there was Microsoft NetMeeting. It was so simple you only needed an IP address to talk to another client. No server necessary. No bullshit "feature" upgrades or streaming ads to justify "cloud" costs or line corporate pockets with additional revenue streams. And that simple client could also talk to those standards-based professional enterprise systems as well.
TL: DR - The free-app-for-dummies consumer we now live in has received exactly what it demanded. Tough shit if you don't like it; the monopoly providing the service doesn't care what consumers think or want anymore.
Only because assholes on the Internet like you are pathologically afraid of change.
Lies. Colossal Cave Adventure was written in '76 and Rogue in '80.
Chances are you still haven't won at Rogue, so you're covered for gaming.
- chrish
The correct spelling of the reviewer's first name is Külli. El Reg could do that, why not /.?
THGTG = The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. The names of authors, including that of Douglas Adams, are always written out in full. Unless Mr. Adams was your personal friend, which is highly doubtful. Same with George Carlin.
In Rowan Atkinson Live (1992), Mr. Atkinson's persona was that of "Toby", the purveyor of the purgatory, wherein he listed the gallery of rogues to be invited, and among them — the lawyers.
Jokes about the lawyers concern not just the profession in the U.S., but also the litigious nature of people who use the lawyers to their benefit and others' misfortune. In many respects, it's not always the lawyers, as they are sometimes just tools of the trade. Some, of course, are terrible if they do evil or happen to represent evil. Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer.
Yours and others' many feelings against financiers are misplaced. If anything, it's the predatory bankers. Not all bankers, but the predatory ones. Now, banks do work towards earning profit, because it's their job. Each citizen should therefore be able to recognise that, and rebuff the advertisements that tell people to take a mortgage out on their house, or to take a long-term loan to buy a house or even a nice flat. Just like you have learned to ignore plenty of communist propaganda, you'll have to learn to ignore plenty of capitalist propaganda, too. The smart people who have grown up in market economies, have usually learned to desensitize themselves of those advertisements. But not all people are smart, and this is what the marketers are banking on.
n/t.
That was when mobile data speeds were low, even on 3G. Unfortunately, developers are also given untruthful reasons in order to commit bad changes.
I was able to get around this by installing an archived Skype 6.3.211.ipa (10/2015) with Xcode. I wasn’t forced to upgrade a newer (but still tolerable) iPad Skype, Skype 6.22.161.ipa (3/2017).
A few hours later I was forced to upgrade again, via a link that didn’t actually work.
You can still use skype 6.20, but you can't login with it. So what you do is run the new version of skype, kill the task, run the old version, it uses the cached login and works just fine.