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Comment by drooopy | Hacker News Reader

The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic to maintain or even expand their lead in video conferencing, while allowing a complete unknown (outside of the corporate world, at least) like Zoom to become the dominant platform, should be studied in business schools.

The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling that, based on personal experience, it is still used in place of FaceTime and other services, especially by older people.

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I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before.

It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much.

After it's marred, they didn't try to mend it much, and when it started to work well due to better bandwidth, they didn't push it back again. It fell to the wayside of "value-adds" all Windows software vendors love to put in the bag.

> "Oh you get the whole Office, great. There's some Skype for you, too. You know it doesn't work well, but it won't hurt to have it installed, no?"

So they blew their chances, badly. I personally don't like Microsoft, but they could have made me use it, if it worked well. Now I use Meet, which is again bundled with Google One, but it's web based and works much better. It also supports the nice features (noise cancelling, advanced backgrounds and whatnot) under Firefox, too.

Personally I think their big, incomprehensibly stupid manoeuver was the Skype vs Skype for Business (Link) split. Had they merged them into a single client that could speak either protocol and share contact lists the story would have been very different.

Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this? Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?

> Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?

I remember somebody saying "Micorosft is an amalgam of different power centers and dynamics. Some people inside genuinely loves open source and wants to be part of that, and some hate it like it's the evil itself. So, there's in-fighting and power struggles in many areas in Microsoft".

I think the comment came after a project manager personally gutted .NET Core's Hot Reload support to give closed source parts a boost, and things got very ugly both inside and outside of Microsoft.

Obligatory "Internal structure of tech companies": https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/6jw33z/int...

Link to original artist: <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts>

(Including a partial update: <https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts-update>)

The Oracle one always gets me lmao

Lync was completely unrelated software with a different tech stack that was just branded as Skype.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business

I know, that's my point - branding Lync (thanks for the correction, I forgot the spelling) damaged the Skype brand to no real benefit.

I know Teams is fairly pervasive, but that's on the usual Microsoft Enterprise stranglehold, certainly not on Teams' merits or riding the popularity of Skype pre Microsoft.

I don't much care for Teams but I write that off to basically not using the Microsoft Office suite at all and maybe doing a Teams call once every 6 months, if that.

It's not just the enterprise stranglehold, though that's surely part of it. But Teams, at least today and on Windows, is GOOD. It works well for internal meetings and chat, calls are good, and on the unregistered outsider webinar attendee experience, Teams has just been better than Zoom in my experience.

Also, even if you just want to buy Teams, from what I've checked the barebones Teams only packages MS sells for smaller orgs are still cheaper than Slack. Actually, let's see... yeap, Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user, Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo, M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo.

> But Teams, at least today and on Windows, is GOOD.

I don't remember the last time I had a meeting on teams that didn't include a rant about teams

I think it was the other way around, they know about the issues with Skype and built something new, but they knew the power of the Skype brand so they slapped it onto their new product.

I think that must have been the logic. I just contend that it was a stupid approach! They damaged their consumer brand badly to give an imperceptible boost to the business product their customers were already locked into.

This is what happens when you hire leet code engineers and they become managers. Look at Google now. This isn't some magical outcome of big corps. A big corp is practically the people who work there.

It’s not really about ‘leet code engineers’ getting into management but the perverse incentives involved in climbing up the corporate ladder.

It’s as if it doesn’t matter what project you pitch and what the fallout is as long as some KPI somewhere gets a boost. Just get your promotion and ride off into the sunset, someone else will deal with the aftermath.

It's not just about incentives. It's about selecting for the kind of people who succeed under those incentive structures.

Even if you're hiring a cross section of the population or a cross section of software developers or management professionals only a slice of it is gonna stick around long enough to influence the organization.

For example, you don't find a lot of Ron Swanson types working for insurance, the court system, or health and safety. Those personality types are either gonna find a new job, turn into a bitter shell of a person counting the days to retirement or go postal and finding a new job is obviously the superior option.

The comparison between Google and Microsoft (or whatever) is gonna be similar though the differences will be more nuanced. Same thing for big banks. Same for big oil. Same for big anything. You've got these differing corporate cultures and incentive sets and they select for different people.

At Microsoft, for every Principal Engineer/Manager there’s a dead internal project that nobody uses but had “… lots of impact.”

Microsoft is built on completely different ethos and evolved from there.

(I think it was Paul Allen is who said it) "Microsoft is a corporation built upon the idea of intellectual property". So being closed source, aggressive safeguarding of IP and locking users in is the DNA of Microsoft.

Yes, company is made of people, but there's also a foundational DNA. When you keep that DNA alive, the company changes and eats the people fed into it, without evolving (See Apple, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc.). Google's DNA has been changed from the top from a powerful but gentle giant to subtle but very evil giant.

> "Microsoft is a corporation built upon the idea of intellectual property".

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists

I mean time has proven over and over that Gates and Microsoft were right.

If your business is developing and selling software to businesses then you want a proprietary license and usually to give it away for non-commercial use. If your business is selling direct to consumer then you need a proprietary license, no source available, and probably DRM.

If your business is something unrelated to software, and uses software as a means rather than an end then OSS is your friend.

America has multiple examples of companies that thrived for decades until a certain type of manager showed up (of which leet code engineers are an aspect; clueless MBA grads are another; there are more). Sears. General Electric. IBM. Companies need to develop a sort of immune response to this type, as they are as charismatic as they are deleterious to company outlooks, and WILL worm their way in if not checked. A more effective Matthew Broderick to stay the Reese Witherspoons of the world.

As long as the companies have a completely autocratic structure, there is no possible way to develop any kind of immune response.

This is assuming that companies are initially led and managed by people who actually care about it and the service/product produced, and that the bean counters and corporate climbers only show up later, when it becomes clear that the business is ripe for exploitation.

There is a bit of irony in this comment since many of the original Skype engineers are now seniors managers at Google still working on communication (they left MS a long time ago).

Google has many issues but I don't think technical competence is one of them.

>Why are megacorps so incomprehensibly clueless about this?

Management by committees. Lots of office politics. Most senior execs have successfully failed upwards. Once every 18 months they let go of people they stick the blame on thereby losing any memory of design decisions.

I feel like I'm currently experiencing failing upwards.

I had a kid recently and have been putting less into my work, mostly just pushing back on asks and delegating because I don't have time.

All of a sudden I have senior management potential haha.

Feels like I'm living in the movie office space

Skype for Business, which was really just a rebranding of Microsoft Lync, destroyed the Skype brand.

But it also indirectly damaged both variations.

Skype for Business became less of a “business” software like Lync was. So unlike Lync, which was fairly spartan but information dense, Skype for Business added a ton of white space, colors, icons, etc making it less efficient and less serious than Lync.

At the same time, Skype itself became purely consumer and went way down that route, focusing more on Temu like animation gimmicks than actually being a communication tool for friends and families.

> Is the money pit so deep that they knock each other in while in-fighting for control on the edge of it?

Yes. rivalry is at it's finest (and fiercest) when you're fighting your peer divisions inside the same company.

Microsoft had MANY opportunities for this, Google as well for that matter. Especially if you consider Instant Messenger clients. I absolutely loved Google Hangouts when it was the all in one solution (including GV and SMS integration on the phone). MS(N) Messenger could have been very close as well a couple times.

It's the management decisions to try to dramatically change or replace things that lands with lesser solutions in the end. Because the incentives and bonus structure are mostly screwed up in many of these companies.

Skype could have been the best, be all, end all solution for MS and brought everyone to their knees and just killed them. But it wasn't the first, or last time this would happen.

Easier to monitor if centralised.

Yes, everyone and their Windows installs and their _NSAKEY guessed the reason was that.

> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before.

Maybe; I think people forget how horrible Skype was on your phone battery when it was still P2P. The P2P-ness of it was definitely pretty cool, but I'm not sure it was worth the decreased battery.

> It was slow, laggy and unstable for most of the time. Also, they didn't invest in the transportation codecs much.

Honestly I've been using Skype to talk to my parents ever since I moved out of my parents place in 2012, and for the last decade or so, it's been perfectly fine. I know it's kind of a meme to hate on it, but it never really was an issue for me.

I think they killed it when they migrated user login to a Microsoft accounts that nobody used or wanted.

For me at least, it made Skype with synonymous with trying to figure out the email and doing a password reset

> I think Microsoft killed it the moment when they made everything move through central servers before everyone had good network connection, everywhere. It was P2P before.

Story in two headlines:

- “NSA offering 'billions' for Skype eavesdrop solution” https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/12/nsa_offers_billions_f... (2009)

- “Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5 Billion. Why, Exactly?” https://www.wired.com/2011/05/microsoft-buys-skype-2/ (2011)

Well, the better ask is why eBay bought it...

And even when eBay thought they bought it, apparently they didn’t buy all of it:

https://www.theregister.com/2009/11/06/ebay_skype/

https://www.hugheshubbard.com/news/the-best-laid-m-a-plans-h...

Oh it gets better. Apparently some of the stuff they didn't get dated back to Kazaa. Some of the Skype founders were under indictment and traveling incognito while they raised money for the new company.

I had interacted with Pritt Kasesalu (PrittK) when I was very young. In the late 90/early 00s I played an MMO developed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) named Subspace, released in the mid 90s. It was a top down astroids-like space game with maps of up to 100 or more players, even back then.

The game shut down officially but the server leaked and became community ran. The original client was not very secure so hacking and cheating became common.

Out of nowhere comes Continuum, a ground up reimplementation of the Subspace client by none other than PrittK, completely eliminating any cheats but changing nothing of gameplay or UI.

He went on to co-own the largest server, Trench Wars, with another player named Dock. There he did custom game bots and other chat-tools. There were rumors that he was involved with Kazaa back then and later on I find out he goes on to be involved with Skype and Joost.

Continuum continued to grow and thrive. The backend server was eventually reimplemented into A Small Subspace Server (ASSS) so now this game was a complete user recreation of the original.

Well, minus the graphics which was in limbo from some sale to a third party company but they never had complaints. Then a few years ago we grt the game green lit on steam.

Little trek down memory lane.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubSpace_(video_game)

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2530450/Continuum/

Amusingly KaZaA itself was one of my first experiences using an “alternative” client for something. There was KaZaA Lite which removed the bundled Cydoor malware, K++ which added hax features like unlimited searches and forced 1000 node reputation, and the most famous KaZaA Lite K++ which did both. Lots of others too like “KL Extensions”, K-Sig, K-Dat, but those were the two big ones.

Wow that was a blast from the past. I remember hanging out on the K-Lite forums back in the day and when a new release was exciting.

Back in the day when you could download random .exe’s with relatively low risk.

Feels unconscionable today that I used to do that from paytv forums.

I think you linked the wrong steam game, it's https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...

Whoops, thank you, yes.

Makes sense that the SuperPeers core from Kazaa was re-used in Skype.

eBay is just a terrible company. (Yet, I like and use it more than Amazon).

ebay had Paypal. They had Skype. And Skype was a kind of social network.

eBay could have been Facebook, WhatsApp, WeChat, WYSE, but eBay always stayed, eBay.

eBay was great for the first few years. After that it just slowly enshittified. The search has only got worse, never better in 20 years.

I can't tell if their research pushes them to make the site continuously worse, or whether they just generally hate their users?

note: I've used it religiously since it launched

My theory is that they sit on a mountain of technical debt that nobody dares touching. I think they started in Perl, then URLs started pointing to DLLs (!), so heck knows what they've done...

They were one of the very first websites that had to deal with humongous scaling issues, so I'm not saying they are stupid - just that, after a certain point in time, they probably ossified at a level that makes meaningful progress too difficult.

Mass surveillance was easier when anyone, including the NSA, could run a supernode. Microsoft had to run its own supernodes because usage changed from most people running Skype on desktops, which could be supernodes, to most people running Skype on phones, which can't. At that point, it hardly makes sense to push new supernode functionality for multiparty video calls and other optimizations to end users to handle a small fraction of calls when updating your own servers is much easier.

WebRTC will happily set up a P2P video call with better encryption than the old Skype had if all you need is a 1-1 call without NAT traversal.

> if all you need is a 1-1 call without NAT traversal.

That part of your sentence is doing a lot of work. It has to be as easy as clicking on a contact for oldsters.

That's the point. That's why Skype had supernodes, and that's why Skype on mobiles meant that Microsoft needed to run its own supernodes. At that point, you might as well add features like multiparty video calls, and then it makes no sense to have your users install supernodes software.

Skype mobile didn't matter as long as you still have a decent pool of desktop users online.

Back then in 2009 we were [1] intercepting Skype calls before the offered plugins.

[1] https://www.nektra.com/main/2009/02/24/directsound-capture-u...

Naw, having been there, Microsoft killed Skype because it had no idea how to manage a B2C product.

> microsoft

> had no idea how to manage a B2C product

What does this mean? MS has enough of b2c products. Windows is. Office is. Not enough?

> MS has enough of b2c products. Windows is. Office is. Not enough?

You really think Windows (11, since anything older is gone) is a b2c product? It's free. It has advertisements. It has a data mining AI. You are not the customer. Windows is a b2b product.

You really think Office (365, since anything older is gone) is a b2c product? It's "free". It has advertisements. It has data mining AI. You are not the customer. Office is a b2b product.

> You really think Windows (11, since anything older is gone) is a b2c product? It's free.

Windows is not "free". Win 11 Home price is $120, upgrade to Pro is $100 [0].

0 - https://www.amazon.com/s?k=windows%2011%20home&ref=glow_cls

"Free" for OEMs, or as long as you're already in the system. Outside of enthusiasts, those are the two groups who matter here (not that I'm happy w/ that situation, not at all).

"It has a data mining AI. You are not the customer."

You got most of the tokens right, but windows is a paid product, try that with meta or google products and you got it.

It is sold to integrators, not customers. No one walks into a store and buys a Windows for their computer at home, they buy a computer that has Windows already on it.

Same with car engines

Yes. Companies selling car engines, or bolts, or on-board entertainment systems, are b2b.

It does have B2C products, but does it know how to manage them?

Bingo

Both of those are b2b as well (a spreadsheet accounting program, come on), and were born from b2b, remember this was before the personal compute era, they transitioned with the era.

Part of it was that performance was abysmal. Everyone jumped to Discord (an electron app!) when it released, because it performed better.

From the circles I was in, everyone jumped from Skype / Mumble / Teamspeak because of D/DoS attacks after having their ip exposed.

It happened all the time because booters were so popular and widely available, costing about $5/mo via paypal.

People were willing to put up with more delay (over p2p) to prevent having to trust each person that joins the TS.

Skype transitioned away from p2p because mobile phones were not very powerful and they needed a lot of supernodes.

First desktop apps were the supernodes, then it turned into centralized servers entirely.

Mumble was never P2P.

I think they killed it by making it unusable through forcing dubious UI/UX/design-principle/other-bs trends for no compelling reason at all on a perfectly good interface.

Sadly this is the culture now at tech companies. All the data has to go through company servers, whether it makes technical sense or not

Pretty sure I flunked a system design question this reason. I was asked to design an online chat system. I asked of they wanted support for groups, they said no. So I gave them simple two way socket solution.

Apparently that wasn’t good enough, They wanted a full DB storing everyone’s conversations, that you could query, etc. I suspected it had nothing to do with any technical considerations. They just wanted that data.

Did they want multi device? How do you sync messages? History?

You can sync with timestamps

History can be stored locally

Centralizing this just seems way more complicated to me, unless you want groups. Even then for small groups P2P isn’t such a terrible idea

Not sure what you mean by multidevice, I do t think they cared about mobile

There are also Jami and Tox as decentralized Slack alternatives.

Or Mattermost, Zulip, or... Briar, among others. :P

Mattermost and Zulip aren't decentralized.

True, you can only self-host.

Skype was born in a world of laptops and either wireless or otherwise unmetered internet. You can have a P2P system there.

In a world where the primary interface is a mobile phone, you can't just run a piece of software on a mobile phone. If you do that Skype will just be known as the app that completely destroys your battery randomly and for no seeming reason.

Smartphones killed Skypes strong P2P presence.

This. In German the word for "video-calling" is "Skyping". Similar to MSN, the strength of the brand and goodwill that it has in some geographies is on-par with Google for search, or Coca Cola for coke. The fact that the software got consistently worse, year on year on year is hard to grasp for me. Microsoft made the right call to cannibalize and use teams. But how was Skype such a pain? Not being able to share screenshots in chat killed it for me.

Coke is a trademark owned by Coca-Cola - the generic word is cola. Their brand is so strong that even though you were thinking about the topic of branding they still got you!

"Yes, in many parts of Europe, people commonly use the word "coke" as a generic term for soda, similar to how it is used in the American South, essentially referring to any type of cola beverage rather than just the Coca-Cola brand; this is because Coca-Cola is so widely recognized across the continent." --Google's ai thing

Interesting, where I lived (NZ), "coke" was the typical term for Coca-Cola (not generic soda, but you may be asked if Pepsi is OK), however in NL where I live now it's pretty universally "cola", and I think that's also not generic. Can't speak to other European countries though, I've never noticed.

In the U.S., it tends to be a regional thing. Coke, soda, pop are all in common use as the general term for soft drinks.

I'd use "cola" in Dutch to refer to the generic type of drink, which is pretty much universal in Dutch AFAIK. But I would use "coke" in English. I'm not sure where I picked that up: I've lived in a combination of England/Ireland/NZ over many years, and to be honest I'm not actually sure how it's used there. Maybe just from US films?

Although what I really wanted was a Pepsi, but she wouldn't give it to me. All I wanted was a Pepsi! AND SHE WOULDN'T GIVE IT TO ME!

I don't know for other European countries, but at least I can say that it is not true in France. "Coke" is reserved for cocaine, and cola is the generic word for Coca-Cola-like beverages.

I don't drink enough to say for certain, but I'll say that I've heard "coca" a lot, but I never hear "cola."

In France coca is a bit generic term for coca cola and pepsi But if you have a brand that sell coke we use cola Like breizh cola or a <supermarket brand> cola

I've heard that the French are strict about language, but what does "reserved" mean here? What do the French call coke¹?

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel) ?

I'd suspect the vast majority of France never has to worry about that type of coke, or maybe even knows it exists.

One upon a time wikipedia used to have links to the other language wikis on the same entry. Now I have to edit the URL to jump to the disambiguation page https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke which tells me it is also "coke" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(charbon)

It still does.

There's a button saying "58 languages" on the trailing edge of where the title of the page is. It opens a drop-down with language selection.

(Presumably the UI is different on mobile, speaking about web.)

Coca cola, coca light, coca zero.

"Charbon". The French commoner will refer to the rock coke as "charbon de terre", shortened to charbon. Similar to "pomme" is apple, and "pomme de terre" is apple from the earth (potato). Charbon is also the word for charcoal.

So my grandma used charbon (coke) when she was a kid. And my mom uses charbon (charcoal) for her barbecue.

In journals and scientific papers the words coke will be used.

In everyday speech, coke means cocaine. Coca is short form for coca cola. And cola is the generic for a coca cola flavored soda.

In everyday speech, coke means cocaine. Coca is short form for coca cola. And cola is the generic for a coca cola flavored soda.

I admittedly used a very rare/specialist example homonym. What I'm really wondering is how context plays into it. If you're ordering drinks in France and an English speaker says they'll have a Coke, does anyone really think they are referring to cocaine? Coke is vernacular slang for cocaine in American English too, but no one confuses this with usage of the brand name to refer to soft drinks (specifically Coca-Cola, or to soft drinks in general, which is a regional thing).

"Un coke s'il vous plaît" is not a proper French sentence. It does not sound right. It will be obvious it's a language difference and people will easily guess coca cola. In fact French people will most likely quip back "Un coca vous voulez dire ?".

Fun aside, coca cola/cola is male. Cocaïne is female. A rail (of coke) is male.

> I've heard that the French are strict about language, but what does "reserved" mean here? What do the French call coke¹?

That's also called "coke", which is why there's a Tintin book called "Coke en Stock". [0]

That said, if you say "coke" in English, almost nobody will think of fuel, and the same is true for French speakers today.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Aventures-Tintin-Stock-French-Sharks/...

If you say the word coke (\kok\) in front of a Frenchman, they will immediately think of cocaine. Most people aren't aware of the other meaning of coke. They will probably say it's coal (charbon), the technical term being coke (but pronounced \kɔk\) or apparently charbon de terre according to the other comments.

In the US south if you ask for a coke they will ask which kind - Pepsi, sprite, or a Coke coke? Etc

In Germany, MS was very successful though to get organizations on Teams during the pandemic. Zoom is not a thing.

Sure, it's nice to brand the verb, but when the product behind it is EOL, why bother.

That's because teams was offered for fee with m365 which most companies used anyway.

Having said that, Zoom is an absolutely terrible product. The backdoor they installed in Macs for example and then when it was brought to light refused to remove it until Apple was forced to blacklist the application. They're either incompetent or evil.

Looking at the Linux version with their hard coded list of supported distros when trying to share your screen...

I'd say both.

Zoom is a thing in Germany.

In the US, I would say roughly everyone uses Zoom outside of companies using Teams or Meet, generally because they're bundled with the office suites they use.

Jitsi and BBB were pretty popular across universities at the time, back when the German government were pivoting hard into Element/Matrix:

https://element.io/matrix-in-germany

Zoom was popular with at home schoolkids. Because to use Teams you had to have a Microsoft acccount first. Zoom was a link, a meeting ID, and password. Sometimes just a link.

I've actually never had to put a password in to any zoom call. It was always just the link. Only when calling from a phone did i have to put even the meeting ID in

You can optionally add the password as a query parameter to the zoom link itself. The links you got probably had that.

Skype should be a textbook case of how a product team will keep inventing new projects to justify their continued employment, even if it means messing with a winning formula.

Skype achieved perfection a year or two after the Microsoft acquisition. At that point they should have downsized the team and focused on maintenance. Instead, they kept releasing new versions, each new version being worse than the previous one.

Skype was perfect BEFORE the Microsoft acquisition. Everything afterwards was unnecessary. Source: I used Skype before and after 2011.

Group calls weren't perfect. P2P doesn't lend itself well to group calls.

Wasn't the whole point of O.G. Skype that it was entirely peer to peer, and did not require a central service? Then, once Microsoft bought it, the first thing they did was ditch that and make it require centralized servers? IMO peak Skype was right before it was bought. Agreed though, every time Microsoft touched it, they made it worse. But many (most?) software is like that now. I dread new releases, because everyone makes software worse now.

msmsgs.exe was p2p. Came with Windows 98, possibly 95. Video, audio, text.

Maybe microsoft forgot they made that?

The selling point of original Skype was that it allowed making audio calls on worst connections, requiring just several kilobytes/sec, and going through NATs (other products required a direct fast connection and were usable only within a local network). As for P2P, I don't think users care about that. Not having P2P is actually better because P2P can disclose your IP address.

For example, Tox is a fully decentralized P2P messenger and it is not widely popular.

There was some drama with regarding to Tox a couple of years ago. I do not remember the specifics.

Is there a security whitepaper for it?

Right, but that architecture falls apart in a mobile-first world.

The p2p part was relevant for the operators as Skype didn't need to run (and pay) their own servers to deal with the load, but some other user close by provided it for free, giving low latency all over the world.

However with shift to mobile the patterns changed and less people ran it on desktops, thus less supernodes and the p2p approach had limitations (no group call) where solutions were needed.

Skype pre-acquisition had constant sync issues. I'd sometimes send a message that would only show up days later, or someone would call me and it would only ring on a different device. P2P was obviously cheaper for them to run, but it became far more stable after they introduced servers.

That's how I feel about Reddit. They just keeping adding things nobody wants because otherwise how do they justify their salaries and their stock price?

Almost everything I do for work uses teams, so I can't say MS missed any boats. It's spectacular how pervasive teams is given how universally reviled it is. I'd personally switch back to slack in a heartbeat for instance.

Don't know about Slack's videoconf, but Slack's cheap insistence that we pay a rip-off amount of money per month for storing some TEXT messages more than 90 days has continuously degraded my appreciation for it over the last years to the level of me hating it now.

They're so cheap. Just put a quota on total storage or something, that actually map to their costs..

We have a Slack for a shared office of 10 people or so, we use it to like ask each other for where to go for lunch or general stuff, it must cost them $0.001/month to host, but you continuously get a banner that says PAY TO UNLOCK THESE EXCITING OLD MESSAGES all over it, and when you check what they want, they want some exorbitant amount like $10/month/user so $100/month for a lunch-synchronization tool. For $100/month I can store like 5 TB on S3, that's a lot of texts.

I'm genuinely curious why they don't have some other payment option, I'd be happy to pay $1/month/user for some basic level if they just don't want freeloaders there. Well, I wouldn't be happy.. but still :)

Slack is primarily a business tool, and for a business tool $10/user/month is extremely reasonable for the value (perceived or real) it brings. The company has to make money, and you do that by charging for your products and services, and that price is not exorbitant.

The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the retention to 1yr.

Nothing is as frustrating as looking for an old conversation referenced in a doc and being smugly told by some corporate dick that Slack isn't for documentation and if it were important info, clearly someone should have saved it. Never mind who, it should just magically happen.

The gap between "messages last for 30 days" and "Slack keeps a searchable record of all your business decisions in a useful way, forever" is huge. I can pretty easily see the value of the latter but it seems to freak executives out for some reason...

They don’t want records around that expose crimes when discovery happens, and they want that so much that they shave a percent or two off the company’s productivity to get it.

> The really egregious thing is that when businesses pay for Slack, it remains unindexed and they just change the retention to 1yr.

That doesn't track with my experience as a user at all. Almost every day I do a search that returns results older than a year.

If it's important enough to mention in a document then the person creating the document should preserve a copy of what is clearly ephemeral information. It's just as daft was referencing emails in a document.

Yes, but what people should do rarely matches what they actually do and deleting old messages just makes it impossible to recover that info.

I find that this take is much more common among managers and executives who are used to being spoon-fed documentation than among the engineers who actually have to write and hunt for it.

This frustrates me too. Discord stores your messages forever for free! They're slowly eating Slack's lunch when it comes to internet communities... but I guess Slack doesn't really care; those communities were never going to pay any real money anyway.

Slowly? Discord is #1 in gaming and probably dev too

Yeah, I'd say discord taking skype's lunch in the gaming market was something that happened "rapidly" and "in 2016".

EDIT: Oh, this subthread is about slack.

I do think Slack's permissions model is better suited to business use than Discord's.

You may like to look at a self-hosted mattermost then.

Slack is part of Salesforce now. Do I need to say anything else?

you're getting services for free and you call them cheap?

Yeah, I just checked to reply to another commenter, and Slack's just expensive:

Slack Pro's 8€/mo/user

Teams Essentials is 4€/user/mo

M365 Business Basic is 6€/user/mo

At my job we use Teams, but basically just for meetings (and the associated chat), and it works really well. About the only complaint I could make is that it occasionally guesses the wrong audio devices, but it's fairly easy to change them.

I didn't understand all the hate until a few groups tried pushing the actual "teams" inside "Teams", and goddamn they are bad. They're an awkward and confusing mashup of chat rooms and forums, with conversations spread across different levels and constructs that each receive different levels of UI focus.

Yeah teams for actual phone calls is good, often with better noise cancelling and reliability than zoom these days.

But the mess of sharepoint/o365 opened in wrappers inside of teams for the teams and it's just a hot mess that makes me angry when the UI is so different.

At a company I worked at someone saved some important data in Teams and left the company and I was tasked with trying to export it but it turns out it would have taken significant time scripting the API to extract all the data. They said forget it and just left it in the Teams and made sure not to delete her account.

It's in her OneDrive most likely, go pluck it out of there.

That's because "Teams" inside Teams are not part of Teams, it's tied to Sharepoint/Exchange and thus poorly integrated.

Some suit was probably worried about cannibalizing their Teams business (even though Skype has better name recognition and Teams has a bad reputation).

It's pretty common in the dinosaurs like Microsoft. Kodak for example had working digital cameras very early on, but didn't do anything with them because they didn't want to cannibalize their film business.

Give a suit a KPI, and they're gonna optimize for that KPI.

Remember, Teams was originally "Skype for Business".

Originally it was Office Communicator, then Lync, then Skype for Business and now Teams.

Digital cameras were mostly useless in the 80s and early 90s for rank and file consumers. The demand wasn't there.

Kodak doesn't make lenses or camera hardware, so it's possible they didn't pursue digital cameras because they'd be immediately out-competed by Sony, Canon and Nikon.

A message from the Skype CEO [NSFW]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI0w_pwZY3E

That was great :)

Teams (which includes the guts of Lync... aka Skype For Business) has grown into Microsoft's behemoth (320 million active daily users while Zoom only has 200k business customers and actually declined YoY).

If you are talking non-business free users then sure, Zoom comes out on top.

Doesn't Microsoft install it on every windows laptop automatically? Are they all "users"?

Active daily users. Any company with Office suite (which is basically any behemoth in every single country) just uses Teams, instead of paying up for Slack.

>The way Microsoft and Skype missed their opportunity during the pandemic

They missed the huge opportunity way before on mobile and in gaming, that's when WhatsApp and Discord stepped in and destroyed Skype.

It also , at least for people in some circles, doesn’t have the negative connotations that Teams does.

I’m more apt to agree to a Skype type setting than someone saying let’s setup a teams meet or I’ll message you on teams.

I am aware a Skype meeting and a teams meeting is essentially the same thing now, it’s just a bias in my mind.

During covid I asked if I could switch my monthly Skype number to annual and they said the only way is to cancel and resubscribe, with a new phone number. It was clear they didn't care even back then.

When my then-girlfriend went off to study in a different country about 10 years ago, Skype was the only video call solution I was able to get working between our OS X and Linux laptops. Generally worked fairly well, too.

Since then, I had forgotten it even existed: "Microsoft is killing Skype? Wasn't it dead yet?"

It's just insane how this is a pattern with microsoft. That should be studied. It's not meant snarky. I am really fascinated. I dislike microsoft but feel that my bias is taking over whenever i get to say things like "of course it failed– it's microsoft". But it is also true every time. Somehow microsoft has a unique talent to take things and just find ways to screw it up in ways, people couldn't imagine. That is really, really fascinating.

But, of course: thank god they blow it every time. They bring the spotlight to the places where others create good things.

Microsoft didn’t miss their opportunity with COVID, teams user base grew by the millions

The anti-trust reactions may undo a lot of that, that already hasn't been undone. I know too many orgs that hate Teams and just want to stick to slack, etc.

Personally, I don't really love any of them... I miss the simpler UI/UX of Instant Messenger apps or Trillian/Pidgin etc. Aside, just looked at Trillian and looks like they did a nice spin on their business model.

I believe they rolled the Skype technology into MS Teams and made teams their dominant video platform. MS Teams is pretty widely used based on all the complaints I hear about it. I didn't even realize Skype was still an option.

What? Teams was and is everywhere. The opportunity was taken so hard, the EU ruled that Teams must be decoupled from the Office Suite and Windows because it was near impossible to not have or use Teams. All that happened because and during the pandemic.

Didn't Microsoft Teams soundly defeat Zoom, Slack, and all the others? I was under the impression that Teams has at least an order of magnitude more active users than any competitor.

It does, but Teams is mostly a thing within businesses. Skype is a consumer side brand, which MS is scuttling in favour of Teams (which is a really weird brand to try to use for consumer-side customers). They could've used Teams architecture/app and branded it as Skype, it would've made way more sense than Teams (free) which is what they're doing now. Consumer side Microsoft Accounts and business are different worlds, it'd help MS a lot to speak about them clearly.

But MS and good product naming, well...

Teams has more users but most of those users didn't choose Teams - it was thrust upon them.

When it's bundled with O365 and shares admin tools, accounts etc, there's no wonder companies pick it.

I don't know anyone who uses it outside of work.

I tried for a bit.. it really sucks outside the work context, and much like when there were too many competing IM products, it just doesn't work without all the people.

Wasn't too bad when most were under ICQ, AIM or Yahoo messenger... but after FB, Google and MS got in the mix it just went to hell mostly. Still is. I mean I have half a dozen messenger apps on my phone each with half a dozen contacts that thing $FOO messenger is better for privacy/comms/etc.

huh? Microsoft massively leverage their market position and spread their teams application like the plague!

They just decided they like teams more then skype

What are you talking about? Microsoft Teams took over everything else during and after the pandemic. The reason for Skype being left behind was that everyone started using Teams in enterprises.

> The term 'Skype' is so synonymous with video calling

IMO this hasn’t been true since 2020.

Big corporations are usually super slow and clumsy in implementing anything new or doing any quick changes.

MS was very quick with implementing LLMs everywhere.

Teams is used quite a bit.

Missed?

They grew Teams, lol.

Zoom - wtf, who the hell uses it after.

Discord would be better example since it is huge, even LLVM community uses it

I suspect quite a few people still use Zoom out of habit / procedure, but you can see on its stock market value that it really was a pandemic success, its stock market dropped and flattened out after 2022.

Now that I'm not at a company that uses Google Workplace, Zoom is far and away the most common video chat I see--but with a few exceptions, I think it's pretty much all just personal accounts.

Discord missed an opportunity to become the video calling and chat king, the smoothness of joining and leaving a group video chat when you please and the high quality video, audio and app support was exactly the kind of "just like being in the office but virtual" experience that teams, skype, slack, zoom, meet, etc lack. During peak covid it was a godsend having calls with friends and playing games together.

My dream service would be very like discord but with scheduled meeting support and completely open source and self hostable.

Gaming laptops today are the best AI laptops. They will never sell as well to the masses because they have a gaming aesthetic. This is true for Discord as well. Skinning HN like it's Facebook will turn you off, even if it has the content you want believe it or not.

Quite a few gaming laptops these days have slightly more subdued aesthetics. Unfortunately they're still huge due to cooling requirements (or rather, because that's a dimension that can be sacrificed without too much trouble) though.

A deaf colleague massively preferred Zoom to Teams because the video quality on Zoom allowed a lot more sign language nuance to transfer.

Zoom has live captioning at lest for the paid version

Both Skype and Teams have captioning. Skype even has voice translation that aims to reproduce the vocal timbre.

Zoom is widely used in US city and state government departments because of the ease of use and pricing, basically free.

It's entirely Zoom for my branch of academia.

I have literally never once used teams officially in any degree. Every call i made before i graduated high school was skype, every school and graduate and job call I've ever made has been zoom.

My company uses Teams and Zoom. Every Teams meeting is a disaster compared to Zoom. At least it's not Amazon Chime. IDK how AWS Support survives that

Amazon are eoling chime

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