The value of the brand is so strong, I am surprised they never launched a "2.0" version built from scratch and without all the vestigial tails.
I'm generally a big fan of Joel Spolsky, but in retrospect, I think this advice is just wrong, and I think Skype is a perfect counterpoint. That is, sometimes a rewrite is a horrible idea, but at the same time sometimes not doing a rewrite is a horrible idea. If making changes to the code becomes such a nightmare that your rate of progress is much less than your competitors, you're going to lose.
While there is still some good advice in that blog post, hard-and-fast rules are rarely correct. Most things in engineering are tradeoffs, and it's tough to know sometimes what the right balance is.
We live in a world with WebRTC, embedded agents and digital telephony. The platforms, OSes, infrastructure are so different from how they were in 2009. Does having your own, 500 kloc C++ real time video chat stack make sense any more?
What I don't get is how MS couldn't use the Teams stack to power Skype as a consumer brand. Probably there was some effort but something got in the way. It might even have been a cultural barrier - Skype was an acquisition, and acquired codebases generally fossilise
Yes, if it is less bloated than Electron-based. See Jami, which is a native app and it's distributed and open source.
Along with the Skype code, the Skype brand was also thrown in the trash. You could question that decision—perhaps keeping both brands for different target demographics would have been a better move. Teams could be for work and business, while Skype (powered by Teams' code) could remain for regular consumers. But I’m not sure. Maybe it’s better to strengthen a single brand rather than maintain two separate products.
That said, I do have an issue with the name Teams—it doesn’t quite fit the use case of calling your grandma overseas.
Totally agree about the brand fumble. I think Teams is the least known/used brand by consumers, but honestly maybe these days that really doesn't matter that much from a money-making perspective.
They are still building on it. For some reason, noone at Microsoft has any idea how the final product shall look like, so they are changing the UI/UX every couple of months.
After smartphones took off, management was reluctant to ditch P2P and move to a client-server model, for both business (running servers costs money, and remember Skype mostly made money on calling PSTN) and technical reasons (P2P was at the heart of Skype). Internally, engineers had Skype working "in the cloud", but it took years of waffling (middle management was distracted by the introduction of Scrum; don't get me started about that; upper management was distracted by the company getting bought and sold twice) before slowly turning around the big ship.
By then, the A/V part of the tech had become commoditized, and plenty of free alternatives (namely FaceTime, WhatsApp, Messenger, Snapchat) had appeared on the scene, with better business models. No amount of rewriting code and building from scratch addressed that latter part. Management was very interested in finding new ways of making money, but it was also (for better or worse) very reluctant and careful in introducing ads into the UI.
I'm surprised that you are surprised!
Rewriting a million-lines-of-code project from scratch without the stupid bits is easy. Getting the equivalent of the working bits, instead...
Joel expressed this concept quite well already 25 years ago: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...
Yes, it's absolutely true getting the working bits correct is hard, by consigning yourself to a slow death doesn't seem like much of an improvement.
Tech has advanced enormously in that time.
It got replaced by Teams.
Of course, as we see here, not doing anything had the same effect in the end...
I am not.
The brand is strong in a negative way, I have never met anyone who ever liked Skype.