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Comment by mindgam3 | Hacker News Reader

As much as I love to hate on Skype’s godawful and seemingly inexorable UX decline since the Microsoft acquisition, I have to give them credit for this latest rollback. It takes balls to admit that you were wrong on such a major redesign.

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.

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On the decline of skype since the Microsoft acquisition in 2011, there is a metric to observe it:

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...

Wow, this is pretty impressive. But where did these people go? Messenger didn't offer video calling until 2015, Whatsapp until 2016.

I simply quit using it. I didn't replace it with anything else.

Maybe a lot were like me, and simply didn't care enough to keep using it.

Apple users stuck to facetime which probably broke up whatever contacts that people had through skype. As an android user I just slowly stopped using skype in favour of discord, except when required for job interviews.

That's for US searches, and it always seemed that Skype was more popular in Europe, but the graph is very similar if you change it to worldwide searches.

Companies are deathly afraid of introducing new brands and cling to the misguided idea of expanding their existing brand into unrelated territories. Usually this results in the brand losing all meaning.

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.

Brands are typically associated with external reputations, but nobody has more exposure to a brand than the employees of the company that owns it. As a result the brand has greater power inside the company than anywhere else - however much a person will say "I'll use this because the name Skype makes me feel good," so much more will Microsoft people say, "I will approve of this because the Skype name makes me feel good."

> So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory

Did someone mention Skype for Business? (... Live 360 ME)

And given how Microsoft trashed the skype brand, I wonder why they thought it was a good idea to use it for a new product.

Even Skype for Business is now being deprecated, and Teams promoted in its place.

See also: Firefox

https://blog.mozilla.org/opendesign/evolving-the-firefox-bra...

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.

What is especially notable about this is that Nintendo recently announced that their Just Dance 2019 game will come out on Wii and NOT the WiiU.

Just for nitpicking, the Wikipedia article says Wii U too (although I know that was a failure, I was just looking for this because it seemed interesting)

Just dance is made by Ubisoft not Nintendo.

Have you tried out Zoom? Hands down best video chat / streaming service I've ever used, we used at at work for our fully remote team communication with no issue. High quality and barely ever any lag

I'm very hesitant about zoom. I use it for conference calling at my job and download the app when I had to listen in to a meeting I was off site for. The meeting ended I exited the call and thought nothing of it, then an hour or two later I got an access notification that zoom had opened my camera, while I was under the impression it had quit. Their technique of downloading an executable every time you open a meeting from the web is also strange and somewhat uncomfortable. I do agree that it works brilliantly but I have my concerns about privacy and safety regarding it.

> Their technique of downloading an executable every time you open a meeting from the web is also strange and somewhat uncomfortable.

Uncomfortable, yes. Strange, no. Very common for "enterprise" conference services to do this.

I feel like they have been redesigning way before the MS acquisition. Every year or so there is a new redesign and I can't find any of the buttons.

They've also deemphasized Skype usernames, which is unfortunate in my most common use case: connecting with someone who requests we use Skype for a one-off international business call.

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.

We ran into this as well as our business used Skype for all internal communication for a time, and it was also used for remote interviews, because in the past most people has a Skype username. Now most don't, and Skype pushes that you sign up with your phone number, which is very hard to find, especially if you're linking to someone not from your country. There is no indicator if they used their local number, their number with the country code, their number with some combination of this, and so on. Likewise, it's not as simple as look for their number and add, you need to add them as a contact first then you can message them.

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.

Indeed. As far as I can remember its been a source of pride to have managed to keep an older version and avoided updates.

This last one on OSx has been particularly bad though. Its just so slow at doing even basic tasks like chatting.

You can say thanks to Electron for this.

It started way before that was even a thing, definitely remember when they switched from old school Contact list window + chat window to an all in one design on OS X my machine would rev up the fans when I video called on the latter.

> 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.

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/

Skype, Hangouts, FaceTime and Slack are all free...?

As in beer.

Exactly. Ok, free/libre then if you insist.

A link just to make sure: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html

> 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.

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).

I also share the same positive experience about Skype versus alternatives.

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