Plus it keeps insisting on showing my profile photo over any new screenshare, and doesn't remember when I pop it out and minimize it. Buttons hide and show (but the background behind them is still opaque).
Skype for business is so insultingly bad that it is pretty much the only piece of widely used software that I am willing to claim that given a month I could write something far better.
Microsoft Teams is impressive that it actually manages to have a worse desktop client than Skype for Business, and the web site is barely any better. If people on O365 haven't used it, they should since Microsoft will force it on you sooner or later.
It is like Microsoft wanted to clone a bunch of popular services (e.g. Slack) and just mashed them all together without a care in the world, and to top it off had to make a bad UWP desktop application that needed touch support so they cut 90% of common features to fit in enough voidspace into the UI for touch.
[0] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoftteams/faq-journey
-200MB minimum memory usage whether you use the desktop app or in a browser. Usually much more
-Animated GIFs animate FOREVER with no way to turn them off, except by turning them off for everyone in your entire organization
-Attachments fail constantly
-Randomly takes over your SfB chats/calls
-Can't have more than 19 people in a chat channel at once
-Bots only work in the unintuitive, threaded "Teams" part that no one seems to grok, not the chat part that everyone actually uses
It's ok for audio/video, but an abomination for instant messages - almost spitefully bad for text based communication due to the way it randomly redirects messages within a conversation to e.g. Outlook.
- Butchers 2-factor auth on mobile and often puts you into a neverending authentication loop (sending tens of text messages if your second factor is setup like that)
- notifications that never clear unless you click on the channel, scroll to the "unread" message, and wait for a few seconds.
The LinkedIn Model.
I mean, they tout GE, a company in the middle of an incredibly well documented and historically expensive failure of a transition to a "digital" company. Probably not the best example. You'll have millions of minutes spent in Skype to wave around when getting everyone actually able to hear and participate takes several minutes on top of every meeting and call.
Right now we've got Slack, WebEx, and SfB. SfB is by far, the worst experience of the 3. Big meetings are on WebEx, and pretty much everyone uses Slack for ad-hoc stuff now. SfB is just too damned painful.
The program has awful UI/UX, calls rarely work, connectivity is a dice-roll most days, copy/paste(this is 2018, come on) is hilariously bad, viewing any kind of cohesive chat history is a disaster.
It's pretty bad when a recently added feature(calls) to an Electron-based chat app already provides a better UX vs. a multi-year incumbent created expressly for the same purpose.
Another comment summed it up pretty well: "enterprise" software has become synonymous with "stopped trying".
My favorite recent thing - I'll hang up a call and randomly SfB will spawn about a dozen call quality survey windows for every call I've recently completed.
Conferences are hilariously late because of this.
Also, Mac screen sharing usually crashes after a few minutes.
Sometimes calls get dropped and reconnnect just fails immediately with some weird error code until you sign out and delete all user data and log in again (waiting minutes).
Chat history disabled.
How we miss GotoMeeting...
If Slack conferences were better we’d all delete SfB ASAP.
No way in hell we would use Teams.
There was an option of Slack vs Teams and we had a huge stampede into Slack, but still have to use SfB because that’s the only way we can make phone calls since our physical phones were removed, and Slack conferencing options are limited.
Don't worry, that's a cross-platform feature. I get it on Windows too.
Dog-folding
business-wise, making things better is only worth pursuing insofar as it helps maintain or advance market position. hopefully they'll see it that way at some point.
Really, I'm convinced it's not the average engineers in the trenches who make the products so horrible, but management and marketing's influence over management that causes everything to be a trainwreck.
(Understood that the same criticism can be levelled at Facetime etc -- which I also don't use.)
I have (on mac), but then I have been treated to terrible call quality and an incredibly poor UI (half the time we need remote control, there is no option for it, for some reason).
I ended up getting a license for Sky, a 3rd party commercial Skype for Business client for Linux. It's pretty decent for what it is, but I could have just installed a Windows VM, used VNC, shared the VNC session and gotten the same thing.
I'm pretty sure there would be a noticeable(couple of seconds) lag between both incoming & outgoing audio to the VM making smooth flowing conversation near to impossible.
http://blog.schertz.name/2016/06/skype-for-business-vbss-upd...
Then we got new C-level executives from Cisco, and the first thing they did was to initiate a migration to Cisco solutions. Their offering is super confusing to end users like me (WebEx, Spark, Jabber, ?) but it works reliably, in my experience.