Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdsubhas | Hacker News Reader

I've been educating as many people (especially Management and Business people) as I can to switch over from Skype to any other alternative (like Hangouts). Because Skype is:

* A memory hog

* A bandwidth hog (its really inefficient about network usage, and uses a lot of bandwidth even when idle)

* Has much lower call quality (a consequence of the above), just try having a call in Hangouts or Skype and notice that Hangouts has much lower audio lag, doesn't kick out people constantly even when screen sharing, etc

* Is now owned by Microsoft

* Never cared about privacy or security (not that Hangouts does, but Skype just sets a very very low precedent)

* Group Messaging is a mess

* Individual Messaging is a mess

The list goes on and on. Its 2016, and "Let's Skype" is not cool anymore. There are much better options available.

View on HN

> * Is now owned by Microsoft

This is not negative in itself. I don't like that it's part of a bigger company because of privacy and focus from intelligence agencies and hackers, but that's just me. I could imagine someone else thinking it's positive because it shows professionalism.

Why is this a negative point for you? And why would something like Hangouts be better, or what would you suggest if you wanted to eliminate big companies' products?

History. MS past is plenty reason to avoid skype.

Why? Management changes, engineers change, everything changes. Saying "No" just because it's Microsoft is incredibly short-sighted.

And even if it were so: the product as it is today was mostly developed while it wasn't even under Microsoft.

No, it isn't short-sighted. On the contrary it is a matter of letting Microsoft earn their trust again at a reasonable pace after almost two decades of systematic abuse. The Halloween documents where published 1998 and it is only the last year or so since they've begun dipping their toes in open source waters. They've thoroughly earned their shame.

Besides, even if everyone at Microsoft has changed attitude that's no excuse. Microsoft has had five years since the acquisition of Skype in 2011. Isn't it, by now, time to stop blaming their predecessors and own up to the current state of affairs?

It's not only that the attitudes have changed. What percentage of the people working there in 1998 are still working there?

by itself, not a big deal. But in Skype's case, the number of issues I had with the application had increased since Microsoft took over. A lot.

You read my mind, while we are 99% an open source organisation we have a couple of managers that are strangely MS centric, if it has their stamp on it - it has to be 'enterprise grade' and there for the only serious option for them.

But Skype is a consumer offering. The "enterprise-grade" product is Skype for Business (formerly Lync), which is a completely different product and codebase (and thus, presumably, with completely different bugs and annoyances).

Not true. Lync is a piece of shit. My current company uses Sky pe for business and guess what is the most annoying aspect: messages don't reach the other end sometimes!!!!!

It also freezes, a LOT. We finally forced our manager to let us use Slack and we love it.

I actually don't mind Lync where I work, although I exclusively use it for IMing and sending pictures of chips back and forth. I'd personally prefer an IRC chat that everyone is logged into, but my guess is that the less technologically-inclined folks on my shift would definitely prefer Lync, and it's fine for my purposes anyway.

altho google hangouts seems better, talking conferencing with a room full of people with mic-speaker setup seems to work better with skype. something to do with AGC and controlling feedback better. maybe hangouts fixed it but it didn't work a year ago.

Hangouts works very well for this now. Well, Chromebox for Meetings (the business version of hangouts group chat) does. It has hardware support for encoding/decoding and generally does a much better job of it than just trying to use 1:1 hangouts via browsers.

That said, it's still far inferior to any commercial videoconferencing product I've ever seen. Literally, the only advantages are cost & integration with other Google services (which is only an advantage if you're already a Google Apps customer).

Skype is shit, but Hangouts is not even a contender

* No desktop client

* Connected to your google account meaning I'll need to juggle several google accounts to keep my personal and business chats separate

Just the fact it doesn't have a native desktop client makes it unusable. I know there are workarounds I can use like nativefier but it's still not as smooth as a desktop app.

Running in the browser:

- Gets grouped with my other browser windows in my taskbar, making it hard to find

- Notifications might or might not work, depending on firefox's whims

- If for any reason firefox crashes all your communication crashes with it

- Susceptible to every single browser bug that allows silent loading of extensions that scrape all your data

> No desktop client

Seeing the level of shitty ported Linux programs I see this as a pro.

> Connected to your google account meaning I'll need to juggle several google accounts to keep my personal and business chats separate

This would be easier with Skype if you have 2 Skype accounts?

When using Chrome:

> - Gets grouped with my other browser windows in my taskbar, making it hard to find

Menu -> More tools -> Add to desktop

>> No desktop client

> Seeing the level of shitty ported Linux programs I see this as a pro.

Well, google manages to make a shitty Linux port of the plugin, so they've got their bases covered there.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=363358

>> Connected to your google account meaning I'll need to juggle several google accounts to keep my personal and business chats separate >This would be easier with Skype if you have 2 Skype accounts?

to some extent. depending on how you start a hangouts, you have no idea what account it's going to start under. The number of times I've gotten on a work call on my personal account because google felt it should use that one

I know each Chrome window can be logged into a different account so I wonder if it just uses the last window (and therefore account) you interacted with. That seems to be the case with links I click on in general. It would be nice if they let you select a "default" account or prompted you for google-specific links.

It's trivial with skype. You just start two instances. On Windows, you need to use a third-party tool, on Linux it's as easy as setting HOME to a different folder for the second instance.

> * No desktop client Uhmmm... https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-hangouts/kn... ... You don't even need to have Chrome open, just installed.

(Tedious disclaimer: my opinions only, not representing anybody else or my employer. I work at Google, not on hangouts)

These problems are largely resolved by using chrome. Pop out any tab into its own window, notifications will work reliably, the security model is far stronger, and most important of all: when one tab crashes, it's an independent process so it can't take any other tab with it.

I use this every day without seeing any of these issues.

I'm sorry, but I use my 32GB of RAM for useful work. Once I upgrade to 64GB I'll consider allocating half of it for Chrome.

I used to make this joke when I put 32GB of RAM in my workstation, to devote 16 to Chrome.

At some point, life started imitating art.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com