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Comment by reitanqild | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Satya Nadella were among those unconvinced by the idea, with Gates pushing instead to add more features into Skype to make it more competitive with Slack in the business market, our source says.

I'd say fix it first.

Somehow the Skype name has gone from being an asset to being a liability to the point where I cannot understand why they renamed Lync to "Skype for business".

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Agree. Especially when you actually open "Skype for Business" it says "Microsoft Lync" at the top. It's a mess.

They've finally fixed this with the last update to the Skype for Business client.

It's still a huge clusterfuck of a rebranding. The two clients are just barely compatible, and it's a huge mess when you're building a Skype for Business tool, and the users think they can use regular Skype to do anything with it.

Hopefully "investing in Skype" is a code word for building out an API for Office 365 Skype integrations that actually works. They've only been promising it for two or three years.

They have regularly bought out companies in that space (last one was Ray Ozzie's Talko, in December, and they specifically said "Talko was acquired to help fuel future innovation in Skype and Skype for Business. As part of the Skype team, we’ll leverage Talko’s technology and the many things we’ve learned during its design and development.").

Let's hope they actually benefit from those.

http://betanews.com/2015/12/21/microsoft-cops-talko-for-skyp...

I think the meaning got lost here :( . I was genuinely hoping for Skype & Microsoft to benefit, it was not sarcastic or anything, and I thought it was relevant information.

> fix it

Don't fix it, just rewrite it. Honestly. If they're focusing on Skype I think that would be great. The feats of that program are innumerable, including breaking system-wide sound settings. I simply can not fathom why it would want to change them.

As for "Skype for Business," it's significantly less stable than Skype. If Lync fails we switch to Skype.

For me, system-wide sounds aren't changed, but I can specify non-system sounds, so that I have my headset plugged in, am listening to music from speakers, if a Skype call rings it rings on the speakers, and I answer and take the call using the headset. I've not seen it change system settings.

I wonder if Bill Gates and Satya Nadella actually knows about the problems in Skype.

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