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Microsoft Turned Customers Against the Skype Brand (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Since acquiring Skype from private equity investors, Microsoft has refocused the online calling service on the corporate market, a change that has made Skype less intuitive and harder to use, prompting many Skypers to defect to similar services operated by Apple, Google, Facebook and Snap. The company hasn't updated the number of Skype users since 2016, when it put the total at 300 million. Some analysts suspect the numbers are flat at best, and two former employees describe a general sense of panic that they're actually falling. The ex-Microsofters, who requested anonymity to discuss confidential statistics, say that as late as 2017 they never heard a figure higher than 300 million discussed internally.
Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has repeatedly said he wants the company's products to be widely used and loved. By turning Skype into a key part of its lucrative Office suite for corporate customers, Microsoft is threatening what made it appealing to regular folks in the first place. [...] Focusing on corporations was a reasonable strategy and one shared by Skype's prior management. Originally [former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] and company pledged to let Skype operate independently from Lync, Microsoft's nascent internet phone service for corporations. But two years later the company began merging the two into Skype for Business and folded that into Office. Today, Microsoft is using Skype for Business to help sell subscriptions to its cloud-based Office 365 and steal customers from Cisco. Microsoft has essentially turned Skype into a replacement for a corporate telephone system -- with a few modern features borrowed from instant messaging, artificial intelligence and social networking. In closing, Bloomberg argues "the complexity of the corporate software (security, search, and the ability to host town halls) crowds out the simplicity consumers prefer (ease-of-use and decent call quality)."
Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella has repeatedly said he wants the company's products to be widely used and loved. By turning Skype into a key part of its lucrative Office suite for corporate customers, Microsoft is threatening what made it appealing to regular folks in the first place. [...] Focusing on corporations was a reasonable strategy and one shared by Skype's prior management. Originally [former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer] and company pledged to let Skype operate independently from Lync, Microsoft's nascent internet phone service for corporations. But two years later the company began merging the two into Skype for Business and folded that into Office. Today, Microsoft is using Skype for Business to help sell subscriptions to its cloud-based Office 365 and steal customers from Cisco. Microsoft has essentially turned Skype into a replacement for a corporate telephone system -- with a few modern features borrowed from instant messaging, artificial intelligence and social networking. In closing, Bloomberg argues "the complexity of the corporate software (security, search, and the ability to host town halls) crowds out the simplicity consumers prefer (ease-of-use and decent call quality)."
Hey Beau,
Might want to fix your link - You're linking
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
When you should be linking
https://www.bloomberg.com/news...
I was a huge user of Skype for years and made sure it was implemented in my workplace. Today, it is the complete opposite, I hate it with a passion. Here are my reasons:
- Incessant and unnecessary updates. As a work tool, I really don't need to update a collaboration software every week or even twice a week. Sure, if it's a privacy or security issue, warn me that an update is needed. If not, you can just let me know once every 6-12 months.
- Everyone that I know that uses Skype uses it for text / video calls with history. That's it, nothing else. It was doing that fine in the original versions, stop trying to shove useless features that are not requested or needed.
- For a "simple" text / video chat application, it shouldn't take gigs of ram and a decent amount of cpu at idle (I've seen 15% in the tray, minized). There is no way you can coat this. It should be ~100MBs tops (and I'm generous) and a flat 0% cpu, I'll even allow 2% usage while its open.
- It should not for ANY reason use ports 80 or 443 by default (which it does)
- The whole windows 10 apps debacle... We had Skype for desktop, then windows 10 came around and apps were all the craze, they created a Skype app, tried to move the whole user base to it, which I unfortunately did, losing all previous chat history. Then months later, they told us the app wasn't working out and said we should move back to Skype desktop? Yet again losing history.
How does the saying goes? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I was out the door at that point.
I'm always surprised at work when people decide to use Skype for meetings. It's so much easier to use something like Zoom instead - it's a lot more straightforward to use, and there's a lot less hassle involved.
In my experience it's useless when logged in on multiple devices. Calls and messages show up in random locations and I don't get notifications. That's pretty broken for my needs. So my team has moved to slack but S4B for screen sharing demos and video calls only.
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Exactly - and this is during the time where Macs have become commonplace in the corporate world and Linux desktops, while still rare, are definitely a thing.
It took ages for the Mac S4B client to support recording meetings, our IT answer to this was 'just have someone on Windows record the call'. No one in our group of 38 people runs Windows (36 Mac and 2 Linux)...
We didn't finish moving off WebEx (kept it for meetings > 25) and are now moving to Zoom for conferencing. We're still S4B for phones (or more commonly using our cell phones) and using Slack for IM.
In my case I have >100 Skype consumer contacts and used to use it a lot, business communications has become split amongst all the above while personal stuff has moved to WhatsApp. What to destroy the value in what you purchased MS.
Skype for Business is also almost impossible to remove. Unlike regular Skype, it can't be "uninstalled" in the normal way and requires registry hacking plus changing security privileges on certain executables to render it inoperative.
That executable, by the way, happens to be named "lync.exe" and many of the supporting files are similarly named. They look nothing like regular Skype.
No matter, though, Microsoft Teams is replacing Skype for Business, which itself "replaced" Lync, which itself replaced Microsoft Communicator.
Kriston