Are there any sites that attempt to describe exactly what's wrong with Skype? I've been using it for years and haven't observed anything outright wrong with it. Is particular functionality broken or something?
All my other Skyping is just messaging and calls for free so it’s lame that they keep trying to expire the money I spent.
Skype for business is a giant ball of shit and perhaps the worse messenger product I’ve ever used, and I’ve used them all since IRC and text in 1993. Here’s how it sucks: -Calls and video consume large bandwidth -Client will peg cpu at 100% for unknown reasons while idling -Sometimes client will freeze in the background and not take calls or IMs -can’t drag and drop images into chat. Sends them as attachments -not reliable. Calls will drop. Individuals on calls will drop. Screen share works or doesn’t work unpredictably. Video works or doesn’t work unpredictably. -Messages aren’t delivered, sometimes with an error that says “prepend couldn’t be reached so message wasn’t delivered” even though the user shows as online and green -Sometimes that message actually was delivered -Mobile does not sync chats with desktop
Instant messaging is so simple and using Skype is worse than nothing. I’d rather email than have a tool that works 90% of the time. Imagine is SMS sometimes didn’t deliver messages. Who would use that.
Coupled with Skype being the reason why all other instant messenger apps were banned from orgs. In 2001, my company was using yahoo messenger, for free, without any of the problems above with 200 people IMing hundreds of times a day (although we never video or voice called). In 2021, my org pays for Teams and Skype and we use a mix of SMS/iMessage and a million other things because no one IMs any more.
SMS does not have a delivery guarantee.
Comically, Skype does have an SLA including delivery and sucks at it.
I don’t need delivery guarantee, I just need reliability. If I could even predict when Skype works or doesn’t, I could at least plan around it.
* Slow startup, slow everything
* File uploads work maybe 50% of the time
* Calls are frequently dropped
* Sometimes will just flatout stop responding and crash in the middle of chat or a call.
* Resource hog
the list goes on.
I have never had that experience with another chat application.
File uploads are blocked by company policy. And it fails with a cryptic error or no error at all when blocked, rather than giving a meaningful explanation.
Then they renamed Lync to be Skype for Business, and now had to try to make those 2 systems work together.
Then Windows 8 comes along and they rewrite the client in Metro, but it doesn't do everything, so the Win32 client still exists.
Also recall that MS had MSNMessenger, so guns all pointing at each other.
Then they got social network jealousy, so tried to do something with Skype, then gave up.
I've still no idea if skype can call Lync/SfB/Teams or not.
I assume at some point they didn't bother making Android/iOS apps because they wanted WinPhone to be a thing.
If anyone is wondering, I believe this might be a reference to this "microsoft organisational chart" [0].
[0] https://external-preview.redd.it/PUA8tCYtXm11ZBA1oLmqESSwjZn...
Hence the redesign around a client-server model, where MS could guarantee call quality a lot better, and which allowed for mobile to thrive.
None of which excuses the UI of course, or problems with the back end. Or lync, or any of the other problems. But it does give some context.
* They replaced a reasonably fast (on Windows) or extremely fast and native (on Linux) application with a slow and bloated Electron-based client that was initially missing many of the features.
* They introduced multiple different types of chats as an attempt to transition from P2P to cloud-based. Depending on when and how you started a chat, it would use one or the other system with no obvious indication but many subtle differences in terms of supported features.
* The web client and desktop client (despite also being written using web technologies) had various differences, such as different parsing of chat message formatting, so what you sent differed from what the other person saw in many cases.
* Terrible/no tools for managing larger chat groups.
And for the mobile app:
* Mobile client is by far the slowest app on my phone (even today), taking easily 10+ seconds from tapping a notification to having the chat fully loaded. (Every other chat app this is <1s)
* Mobile client frequently misses or is late in showing notifications of received messages.
* Mobile client used to murder my battery life. Thankfully this was fixed a few years ago.
Even before then, it was extremely spotty with occasionally refusing to deliver messages, not being able to hear the other person on calls, and other stability issues. But it's been so long, I don't remember the exact details anymore, just that it gradually went from a piece of software that I really liked to something that was giving me the most trouble out of any software I was using.
Feature creep expressing as bloat.