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Comment by random5634 | Hacker News Reader

God - skype went to hell - absolute garbage new interface etc. It's something maybe with their tech stack that does not handle realtime audio etc and then on design side it's all non-usable social network type stuff?

I honestly could not believe how badly they trashed skype - instead of it becoming WhatsApp it just imploded at least for my use case.

I use teams, while confusing it seems miles better than previous effort (zoom still by far the best for video).

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Well that's probably at least in part because a major motivation for that acquisition was not to actually improve the underlying technology. To quote verbatim one of my favorite hn posts of all time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18411779):

  A series of headlines:

  2009 - NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution [1]
  2011 - Microsoft buys Skype for $8.5 billion. Why, exactly? [2]
  2012 - Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft [3]
  2013 - Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages. Subhead: Skype worked to enable Prism collection of video calls [4]
  
  1. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_for_skype_pwnage/
  2. https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/
  3. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft/
  4. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/microsoft-nsa-collaboration-user-data

Interesting. I did some work overseas in out of the way places - did supernodes used to be potentially very close to you if you had your own network that was limited back to larger internet?

Potentially yes: the supernodes were just other "regular users who had sufficient bandwidth" which could be quite efficient if you were all in, say a remote region with good local bandwidth but little connection back to the rest of the world. Obviously though, this P2P structure would make interception of message content by Skype corporate rather implausible! There's a pretty good figure and explanation in the ars article above.

Microsoft never really seemed to know what to do with Skype and I suspect because of that they never devoted the resources to build it out and make it better. It checked a box for them when selling to enterprise customers, but they failed to imagine what it could become.

And I agree-Microsoft Teams is solid, but could use a faster and better designed user interface. The video chat feature is also sub standard compared to Zoom, but it largely hits the good enough threshold.

Agreed - Teams is good enough, but a bit laggy and things like backgrounds lagged for users WFH.

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