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Comment by ent101 | Hacker News Reader

I hope it won't suffer the same fate as Skype.

I feel like what a lot of people miss about the decline of Skype was the move to smartphones. Chat, audio and video tech built for PCs with wired connections all needed to be replaced with stuff that accounted for the growing number of mobile devices. I remember the brief period where I tried to use AIM on my early Android phone, and it turned it into a skillet, basically, and the battery life was cut by hours just by running AIM. It's not a coincidence that _every_ chat app (text, audio, video) that was popular before smartphones were replaced by ones that were written after smartphones became popular, and it makes no sense to analyze Skype outside of that larger trend.

Skype is still great. The only issue with it is spam. Given my popular in Russia name (I'm actually Bulgarian) and that fact that I have there "nikolay" username, I get constantly contacted by Russian scammers or just random folks. Same with Telegram. There's no way to configure my account to allow messages only from friends or block certain countries. Basically, I can't use either service - it's overflowing with spam and there's nothing I can do about. Well, I did actually try to start blocking people as some keep sending me messages on Skype, but guess what - suddenly, my Microsoft account got disabled. I am a paying customers, I have Family Office subscription, premium Outlook mailbox, Skype subscriptions, Xbox, etc. After many days, and multiple escalations, they found the reason! And it was the most stupid one I can ever imagine - my account was blocked and queued up for deletion (it's 20-years-old!), because I was excessively blocking people!!!

> Skype is still great.

In 2015 my Skype install used >3GB of RAM within minutes of launch. Searching for an uncommon term in chatlogs took hours. I've not been able to open it at all for years because it just hangs on boot.

I'm sure that for the average user none of those are concerns because they're talking with a few dozen users at most, but it had incomprehensibly terrible resource management, which is why all the power users jumped ship the second a viable alternative text chat became available.

I think it still carries a lot of legacy of the almost serverless original Skype. A lot of things must be fixed, but it still (I am speaking of today's version) a very solid tool, which I use daily. In addition, it offers a decently priced calling services, which I use, too - much cheaper than those of rivals and quality is great, too.

Or more recently Mixer.

I really don't think this will happen - Discord has hit a sort of "critical mass" that you don't just kill like it happened with Mixer.

If anything, I hope they will treat it like GitHub and let them act mostly on their own, while actually improving the service.

Recent feature additions point to an Enterprise service they are setting up, so this may be a part of their new strategy while keeping the service accessible to free users despite their crazy operating costs.

Microsoft's strategy with GitHub is very likely to replace their old Azure DevOps (Server) offerings within the next 2-3 years. Then they can cash in on the Windows and mac/Linux crowd at the same time with a single product.

The same will probably happen with Discord inside the Xbox ecosystem where they want to rival Steam with their Xbox game pass. Discord is the perfect community to do it with.

It won't. When Google acquired YouTube, there were similar concerns that the platform would be "corporatized" to death and be replaced. Corporatized, it has been, but its dominance in its marketplace is stronger than ever. Twitch has emerged as a serious competitor for games, but YT remains just as big if not bigger than Twitch in this corner.

GitHub and LinkedIn are similarly thriving under Microsoft's wing, without a Twitch-like competitor in sight.

Instagram is more popular than ever since it was acquired by Facebook.

Discord will be fine. Microsoft has a lot of experience in the gaming space thanks to the Xbox ecosystem of services, and in the online chat room space, thanks to Teams.

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