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Comment by orev | Hacker News Reader

A counter example is Skype. They have destroyed the reliability, and turned the app into an embarrassing toy in an attempt to push serious users towards Skype for Business. They are also basically requiring the use of the Windows App Store version, which is seriously lacking in both features and usability. A true study that MS has not changed it’s stripes that much.

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I think you should look into how shady the P2P model of Skype was and how easily super nodes could eavesdrop on other users.

It was also completely unreliable when a large chunk the user base switched to mobile messages won’t send, send out of order, would go into the limbo only to appear X days or even months later and if you were signed into multiple devices you were out of luck since if your desktop would’ve received a message while your mobile didn’t you would never see it on your mobile.

Skype died for many reasons MSFT not continuing with its botnet like network model as it’s a huge liability for them isn’t one of them.

Is Skype really dead? I still use it and it works and other people that I know use it. So, I wouldn’t really call it dead I guess.

I think it died with a certain crowd maybe.

I stopped using it even to talk to my mother who’s almost 80 everyone I know dropped it for WhatsApp and FaceTime.

This is definitely true. I think a couple things went wrong with Skype, the main problem is that it just didn't fit cleanly anywhere in their portfolio. They had some stuff that could consume it (Windows Phone needed a face to face video messenger to compete with Android/iPhone, Xbox Kinect had just came out and they could kinda put it in there, there was a need for it to maybe fit into business meeting use cases, and Live messenger usage was dwindling). These were all really different use cases and they kind of shoved it into all of them, and really broke Skype UX.

Github at (least for now) serves a clear purpose. Microsoft has been positioning itself in the developer productivity space. Right now they have Linux (some) and Windows code productivity tools (vscode and all of the Visual Studio stuff), and end services (Azure/SQL Server/Windows) but no source control or code deployment tools that anyone can speak to (TFVC and VSTS are used, not widely popular, and aren't free to use). I bet Microsoft will start integrating more of their services to use Github Enterprise, build out CI/CD features (or offering them in an online "app" store) in Github, and then continue building out their free developer toolset.

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