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Comment by radiorental | Hacker News Reader

Skype is terrible, I have to use it to connect with family in Europe & Australia and it's getting to the point where I'm contemplating teaching my 70 yr old mother how ti use google hangouts (shudders)

However, Skype for Business (formally known as Lync) is rock solid.

I would postulate that since the rebranding of Lync, the old consumer-Skype is on an end-of-life roadmap.

Hololens + LyncSkype in an enterprise & smb setting makes a lot of sense.

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Urk, I take it you haven't used Lync outside of Windows? The Mac version is horrible mixture of Silverlight+HTML5+Standalone App in which none of the mentioned pieces can't handle the full functionality. On the other hand Skype and Hipchat just works (unless you get hit by the Skype bugs:p).

Skype for business is the biggest dumpster fire of software that I've had to use for work in the last few years. Truly awful- resource hog, screen sharing rarely works, and frequently crashes.

I'm glad I'm not alone in thinking this. Every little corner of the application seems to have a new UX failure or short coming that blows my mind.

Likewise, I'm amazed at how bad it is. Screen sharing issues, copy paste issues, lock ups (while everything else continues working fine), problems with not saving old messages properly, can't send messages because they are too long (really!?) ....on and on. Microsoft has been screwing up messengers for 20? years now - yes, I know different teams - and still, every new release or client is literally 1 step forward, 1 step back.

I feel the exact opposite on both counts. I've never really had a problem with Skype for desktop (though I agree that Hangouts is better), but the week after I updated my work machine to Lync was full of lag, dropped connections, and a suddenly bloated interface.

This is bizarre because your experience is the exact opposite of mine (and the grandparent) - for me, Skype for Business is damn near perfect in every way, Skype desktop I hate with a fiery passion. Microsoft is a strange company.

I have the exact opposite opinion. Skype still works quite well (although sometimes it's not great about syncing chats across devices, but it's better than Facebook), while Skype for Business has constant issues and makes me miss Lync.

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