Skype rolls back its redesign by ditching stories and squiggles
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
No idea what they were smoking when they decided that their target customer was Snapchat users. Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail. This alone has made it my go-to for mission critical video chats. All I could do was cringe in embarrassment when trying to schedule business meetings and seeing those squiggles pop up all over the place.
Skype UX doesn’t need to be “fun”. It just needs to be usable. Kudos to the powers that be for making a tough call to benefit their core userbase.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
Maybe a lot were like me, and simply didn't care enough to keep using it.
So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory (social media). The technical aspect or what users actually want is a afterthought.
Microsoft could release their own alternative to current social media apps but they won't just start small and build a new brand.
Did someone mention Skype for Business? (... Live 360 ME)
I made a comment about this in a similar vain: Mozilla wants to overload the Firefox name to the point where it's totally meaningless. The success of the Firefox name is no doubt the reason but this fails to recognize that's not how names work. This direction is exactly the reason why Nintendo called their console "WiiU" and that turned out about as well as this ultimately will.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Firefox being the name of a single product. The entire underlying premise of this redesign is flawed.
Uncomfortable, yes. Strange, no. Very common for "enterprise" conference services to do this.
I find I can type, say, jsmith123 into the search box and I'll somehow either get multiple users listed as having that username or a bunch of similarly named accounts, possibly ranked higher than the one I explicitly typed in.
It's really unintuitive and contrary to how people use Skype. It's using the method whatsapp, telegram, et.al use, but they don't really have a discoverability feature. You know someone, or you don't until you know someone who does.
Skype should either have just ditched the username search or embraced it. They tried to make it both, but they really didn't pull it off well, and now there is an entire subset of the userbase you cannot find with their find feature.
This last one on OSx has been particularly bad though. Its just so slow at doing even basic tasks like chatting.
I think it's important to include at least one free video chat app when doing a comparison. Have you tried Jitsi Meet[0]?
[0]: https://meet.jit.si/
A link just to make sure: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
Wait what? I have, at least for personal communications, the exact opposite experience. Skype video often cuts out and pauses, or even entirely drops the connection, at which point me and my friend(s) either switch over to FaceTime (if they have iDevices as well, since its by far the most reliable in my experience) or WhatsApp video (decently reliable and pretty much everyone has it).
That was the last straw for me before my account got the axe.
The investigation took weeks and the final resolution was "the account is gone, the credit in it is gone, just create another account."
The password reset happened two days into a seven day vacation. The account takeover happened while we were flying home. That the attacker waited until we were likely to be completely offline for several hours makes me suspicious that either hotel staff or staff at the hotel's Internet provider were involved. We have contacted the hotel but they seem uninterested.
(Ideally with the ability of callout, buy a phone number etc)
None of the non-gaming VOIP solutions (I know of) even have voice activation, which drives me crazy.
For text, my friend circle has shifted to just using whatsapp web, again, I'd prefer Signal,or Matrix (or even IRC), but there's the network effect shrugs.
I can live with TS3 and whatsapp over Microsoft Skype any day of the year.
Anyway, it would be great to get in touch with you, I'd like to send you an invite link and see if you could validate some of the ideas. :)
To be fair, Skype also appears to be trying to add a lot of baggage too.
Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.
Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Dialpad.
Lesson learned. Stallman up and stop relying on proprietary systems that spy on you and cooperate with murderous regimes.
They made a technical decision to shelve/bin their native desktop app code, in favour of Electron.
There are 5K public repos on GitHub alone that match a search for "Electron" are they all spying on me and cooperating with murderous regimes?
Just kidding. Slack supports none of these features and neither the other competitors. There is just nothing comparable to skype.
Slack for sure supports voice calls and screen sharing.
No amount of customer support chatting or Microsoft supoort calling could get that account back, or even get someone to investigate the fraud. I suppose that Skype makes money off these transactions so why bother to stop it.
You can still install the latest 7.41.0.101 version of the classic Skype on a Windows 7 or newer system using one of these links:
https://go.skype.com/classic.skype
http://download.skype.com/msi/SkypeSetup_7.41.0.101.msi
https://download.skype.com/5d7ac191986ccb485223c4e4e9e3e4ce/...
I did log into Skype recently on my old forgotten accounts - one I was using on daily basis and other I tried to delete because of unfortunate username (no response of course happened from Skype back then; leaving account to rotten for period of over 365 days didn't do a thing). Both were working without problems (tho, chat history was gone as they announced), not connected with any Microsoft Accounts.
And honestly, MSN Messenger was the best service MS provided - sans that short time when it was the annoying Windows Messenger bundled with XP
...Except that was around 2 years ago and it still exists - and it's still the only one that comes up when you search Skype for my name.
Oh, and I still can't log in to it, either.
When has this type of thinking ever been a good idea?
That is a mistake regardless of the product, space, etc.
Customer testing: “what feature you do use every day”
“Stories.”
We should put stories in.
Early testing indicated people were not happy. The people involved made their impact, got their promos and moved on.
When Skype was acquired by Microsoft, it was flooded with PMs (primarily) and devs rolled in. I think LinkedIn has done a better job shielding itself from such.
I’m glad to see the rollback, but from talking to friends and family, a lot of damage has been done - mainly around rolling out new design above all else despite degradation in features and quality.
Messages are so unreliable and inconsistent that they can only be used for something where you don't care that much if it's ever going to be received - which is, I'd assume, not that often. I had a message from my colleague - sitting next to me every day and having Skype open every day same as me - arriving suddenly 6 days after he sent it. And dozens of minutes of delay is just normal.
I mean everyone had instant messaging figured out long before Skype - ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN...It's just inexcusable.
For a long time, this experience was tied to the Skype brand. Then FaceTime was released and I could video call my friend in Haiti in high quality without installing new applications, so that's totally replaced Skype for me.
When we tried Discord for a while the reliability was ok but some folks had struggled with the user interface.
Eventually IT rolled out Office365 but Teams was so unreliable for most people in my group that we stopped using it for our daily stand-up meetings and switched back to Skype.
Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference)
Yes. Today, there are N somewhat crappy corporate video conferencing solutions. It's feasible to convince a VC to fund a new one, because they do a lot of video conferencing, and really understand the pain points.
Thus, tomorrow there are going to be N+1 somewhat crappy video conferencing solutions. It just seems like one of those "simple on the surface" issues, that turn out to be a massive can of worms.
Zoom,
1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.)
2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)
It's not quite what I'm talking about. That link is unique to your user, kind of weirdly, and is some sort of personal meeting room.
I'd like to assign names to meetings, not to me; every meeting that I happen to schedule the meeting for shouldn't all have the same name; the name should be descriptive of the meeting itself. That is, a meeting about widget production shouldn't be "suzieqmeet" just b/c Suzie Q. scheduled it; it should be called something like "widget-production". A later meeting about spline reticulation could just be "spline-reticulation"; the URL "meet.vc-company.com/spline-reticulation" is obvious, and trivial to transfer over speech to a coworker.
The great thing about Hangout, IIRC, is that it sort of automatically slugifies the meeting subject, so the defaults are pretty close to "magically just works". Trying to convince my entire coworker base to adopt "vanity URLs" is not going to happen, and doesn't really solve the problem.
The apps are free to try if you'd like to. We also do nice hardware setups for meeting rooms. Comments are welcome.
Hopefully they will work to improve "Skype for Business" to work more like Skype.
Skype for Business is just horrible.
1) Messages appear grouped by who I send them to, but there are multiple message threads. This wouldn't be the end of the world, except if I respond on my phone or laptop the responses go to different message threads. Impossible to read back a message thread and have it make any sense.
2) Most of the time, there's a sync issue... I get messages on all devices, but if I reply I only see my responses on the device that I was on when I typed the response. Mix with point 1, and I have no meaningful history being logged.
3) Messages take different amounts of time to get to a phone or a computer.
4) Files will silently fail to send. I look at a conversation, and it looks like my file goes through... then I look back a day or so later and it says, "File failed to send." So aggravating. Can't rely on it at all.
Anyway I know it's probably more to do with the instance my work set up, but this is my first time using Skype for Business since it rebranded away from Lync. And the experience hasn't been good. Give me Slack or Discord or WhatsApp... really anything else. No shortage of options these days.
For the rest, I don't think that skype can work at all when opened on multiple devices. It should be easy enough to uninstall from your phone.
It's a heart, and it attempts and fails to "like" the voice call.
Then I press in the middle of the screen and the sole red button becomes a "disconnect call" button.
How does that get through A/B testing? How does that get through, "hey Aunt Linda, try to make a call." testing?
iTunes, Spotify, browsers, editors, everything is shown in fullscreen, and often designed like that. It's doesn't make sense on 27" screen, and it doesn't make sense on an 13", but everyone seems to think that their product is why people have computers, nobody want's to be just a service.
Maybe it's a little like CPU, disk or RAM. We have more of it, so applications use it, while not giving us more actual functionality.
The old ICQ, MSN and WinAmp got it right. Take up as little screen as possible and just sit in the background and do their thing.
Stacking windows makes them easier to manage, especially on Windows. You just Alt-Tab and it's predictable where the next one will pop up.
90% of the people I've seen, especially regular people, use full screen windows.
After the redesign every call now connect pretty fast, but there is no audio or camera for 60 seconds. Every Call & the echo remains.
Piece of shit.
It's sad. It was so simple and worked well all those years ago.
Also, once you've tried Whatsapp calls, Viber calls, Google calls... Skype is so much better.