160 People: Skype 5 for Mac = Fail. Skype: No Comment

A lot of people on that thread were very specific in their feedback. Both pointing out their grouses and what could be done to fix them, so I disagree with your unkind characterization that they were just a 'few people who don't like change'

The least Skype could have done was post a simple

"Thank you for the posts, we are evaluating all your feedback"

Too much to ask?

First of all, what does the barely 3d cover-flow view of my contacts suppose to help me with? Even if I maximize it to screen-size, I can only see 9 contacts (1 fully, 8 partially) at once, and they are all resampling of Icons of what 128x128 pixels? Form and function FAIL.

Second, what happened to conversation history? If I click show 6 months, I can't go back to show 1 day. Dead end workflows are always awkward.

Lastly, why in the world is there so much spacing? There's like 100px of completely blank paddings everywhere. The icons and fonts are already ginormous. Making the window so much bigger doesn't make me more likely to use it.

The UI design makes no sense whatsoever. It must have been done by an automatic random UI design decision maker.

With Skype 5 for Mac, I haven’t heard a single soul say anything positive about it.

Skype is an indispensable tool for a lot of people, including me. All I want is it to get better. But Skype 5 doesn't really look like a step in that direction.

Thankfully the newest beta makes sure that when you flip back to Skype the text input is always the active UI element in your chat (as opposed to the title for whatever god awful reason).

The UI still takes up a huge amount of space, but it is at least usable now.

Not being able to tear video out into a separate window is still very frustrating however.

However, note that the first post in that thread was Nov 4, 2010. That's over three months ago. By this time, they definitely should have at least posted something indicating they've heard the user response.

I actually agree with your point, but comparing Facebook users (fraction of 500 million) to Skype for Mac users (unknown to me, but I would suggest less) is not a straight comparison.

There are the Eurobusiness people who live in it, the Eurobusiness people who live work and play in it, the casual users who use it for the occasional phone call, the teens who use it as a substitute for AIM and everyone else from what I can see. Basically, they're trying to compromise on that, and not doing a great job.

I like multi-video-chat so I can bare with the ugly interface.

For someone to complain about the Skype UI it is much harder, they would actually have to seek out a forum and register with the forum.

So 397 folks actively seeking out and registering + 160 registering to Skype's own forum does say something, no?

I wonder how many people really don't like it, but are living with it because they can't be bothered to seek out and register to complain!

- I hate that they removed the contact list. There is an online contacts window, but it stays always on top and can't view/change your status from there.

- You can't pop a video call window out. This is insane, you can't video chat with someone and text chat with some one else at the same time. Screen sharing is almost unusable. This is actually reduced functionality compared to 2.x.

- There is empty space everywhere.

- It feels like they are pushing you to buy stuff everywhere.

All joking aside, a lot of Mac users are just sticking to the older 2.x series for their Skype client rather than upgrading, so if a 160 people decided it was worth their time to complain on the Skype forums there are probably many more!