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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)."
Skype and Skype for Business are different products, not vaguely compatible with each other (which is part of the mess up that MS inflicted). Office Communicator was rebranded Lync (fine...) and then re-branded "Skype for Business" without changing the technology base (bad, terribly confusing).
S4B is generally dreaded even by microsoft users (though when it works and everyone has the software working *and* their respective organizations can talk to each other *and* policies actually allow the meetings to work... it's not too terrible most of the time, apart from some general UI glitchiness...) When you have an attendee using OSX... it almost works sometimes. When you have a linux attendee, well you are out of luck for anything but text (officially), unofficially you can get a plugin for pidgin which can sort of participate in calls and screen sharing (the UI is a bit challenged for pidign-sipe, but is actually more powerful for the functions that work).
For all the rhetoric about "oh Skype's ailing because of focus on business needs", S4B compares poorly with pretty much all of its business oriented competitors.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
MS's handling of Skype is "good" example of how to run a product right into the ground:
* Shitty redesigned UI remake that no one asked for, and
* Forced updates that removes features
Q. How could MS screw it up even more?
A. Delete old threads
* https://community.skype.com/t5...
I'm surprised Microsoft hasn't deleted this thread yet:
* https://answers.microsoft.com/...
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 don't know what their major malfunction is; but MS has a singular "talent" for taking wildly successful Products and turning them into useless piles of shit.
I know, because they are currently doing that for the ERP product I Develop in for a living.
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.
Delete all source code commits to the skype repository from the day Microsoft acquired it. Fix any outstanding security issues. Skype goes from being a piece of shit to a mature, reliable, multiplatform service that everybody loves. Just run qmake and nmake or make to build the skype client - from the same source tree - on Windows, OS X, and even Linux!! Can you imagine? It's like something from a distant utopian future that can never be!
Long story short, my hotmail email was stolen under Microsoft's watch. Someone used it for spam. I can't use skype now a decade later. There is no recourse.
It is the unintended consequences here. I can't use skype, therefore the people I do business with can't use Skype to talk to me, therefore requiring us to use something else. Once your clients have installed something else and figured out how to use it, its not that scary anymore.
If Microsoft has another use case similar, forcing honest folks like myself to use other services, and their clients, it doesn't take long to see a ripple over time. People either don't need to sign up, or end up using other software at least half the time.
I have used Skype for a long time. It worked fine before the UI was updated, and I did not enjoy having to relearn where almost every single UI element was located. But I would not have had a reason to stop using it until the ability to store a telephone number for a Contact was removed. Literally half the point of Skype is that it bridges the online world and the telephone world. I used it in a foreign country to call an 800 number for my travel agent when I needed help. 800 numbers don't work in foreign countries - THAT WAS USEFUL and it saved my bacon. But now I can't add new phone numbers to contacts, and I am looking for a Skype replacement. You want to know why people are leaving? Well, I imagine I'm not alone. :-)
Skype for Business fails at instant messaging. Any other messaging client (including business competitor Cisco Jabber) can properly handle people logged in from multiple places. Microsoft's offering? I can be mid conversation with someone, and suddenly their messages start going to another desktop 3 buildings away that's been locked for hours, or my phone, or who knows where. How hard is it to send the same messages to all clients logged in with the same user?? If anything it should be easier than whatever fail logic it's applying to try and figure out which one is the "active" session...
You do NOT want to be using Discord for anything business related, or hell anything even remotely private. Hate all you want, Discord still has some serious fundamental privacy issues to address. Their official clients leak, in real time, telemetry back to Discord. Not talking about the typing notification (which in itself is retarded), but any client actions. Going into preferences for example even if you make no changes. The clients actually leak even the local username, etc.
As if that wasn't bad enough, you can't even fully disable media interception nor their previews. If you "share" an image for example it gets intercepted and hosted off their own cdn. The preview is downloaded despite being turned off.
The client itself still loads on startup.. randomly starts chewing CPU/GPU time, typically overnight.
ETC. The devs don't give a damn.
It's by far the most unreliable software I have to use.
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
No, I think the article is spot on.
Microsoft has done two things that individually make sense, but together spell disaster:
They have acquired Skype the consumer product, and made it a Microsoft federated service.
They also rebranded Lync Messenger as Skype (for Business), but they customary drop the "for Business" part.
So now there are two incompatible products called Skype, both with near identical branding.
What could possibly go wrong?