• @[email protected]
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    1401 day ago

    They are not killing Skype, they just now bury the corpse. Skype died by malnutrion and bad parenting by MS a decade ago.

    • @[email protected]
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      231 day ago

      Well, they’re doing what they already have been and absorbing it into teams. Teams video chat is littered with the bits of leftover Skype tech references, they’re just making sure it’s an enterprise product they can bill monthly for instead of a free consumer product

      • @[email protected]
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        423 hours ago

        I find 365 to be a terrible mess if applications, outlook and teams have a calendar separate to the calendar app. Teams sucks

    • @[email protected]
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      220 hours ago

      I was going to say it couldn’t have been a decade but then I realized the last time I used Skype was about 2015 2016…

  • @[email protected]
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    23 hours ago

    I remember when Skype first came out, when I was a teenager. I called a random guy in Japan; he was learning English, I wanted to learn Japanese (as is tradition for teenage anime fans). It was a very kind series of calls, and we talked a bit about Japanese culture too. He taught me, rather patiently, how to pronounce certain basic words properly.
    It’s a shame the service was treated like it has been. There was great potential in connecting people.

    Wherever you are, random Japanese dude I forgot the name of, konbanwa!!

  • @[email protected]
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    831 day ago

    Another company Microsoft bought and ran into the ground. It’s really incredible that they managed to get their lunch stolen. They had basically a monopoly and gave it away without a fight. Hell, the colloquialism for video calling someone was to Skype them for a looong time.

    And then one small competitor comes along and it’s all gone. How can you fuck up this bad? Especially during the pandemic, in which they should have further entrenched their monopoly…

    • @[email protected]
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      331 day ago

      Was Skype really relevant when the pandemic hit? Nobody I knew used it anymore. And teams had mostly taken over for Skype for business by then as well.

      • PhobosAnomaly
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        1 day ago

        My org used Skype For Business and it worked remarkably well. Much more lightweight, though somehow still a little less responsive than it should have been.

        It has that “it just works” factor for video calling, whereas Teams almost needs a fucking checklist to rattle through if someone’s audio or video feed isn’t working.

          • PhobosAnomaly
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            31 day ago

            Yeah I’ve still got my headsets from boxes with Skype For Business branding that have “Compatible with Microsoft Lync” stickers on them.

            It’s probably closer in UI to Skype from the 2000s that the “real” Skype never really recaptured. Not sure if that’s a good or a bad thing.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 day ago

        Skype for business is Skype in name only. It’s basically Office communicator with several name changes

    • @[email protected]
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      111 day ago

      Around these parts in the 2000s, MSN Messenger was what literally everyone used. Then Microsoft bought Skype and decided to shut down MSN Messenger. Then they also ruined Skype. Microsoft just can’t do anything right despite making so much money. It’s like they have no long term vision.

      • @[email protected]
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        324 hours ago

        I would say this heavily depends on the region. In Germany, I knew nobody who used MSN, everyone only used ICQ.

        • @[email protected]
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          123 hours ago

          That’s why I said around these parts. Back then there was a lot more regional fragmentation.

          • @[email protected]
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            120 hours ago

            Around my region, South America, everybody used MSN as well. We went through a phase of using Skype, but it was too resource heavy in comparison with MSN. Later on, people who needed voice chat for games played around with several different apps, until we finally settled with Discord back in 2016. Say all you want about Discord, but I’ve been using it for almost a decade at this point, and if your need is to have voice and text chat and easy screen sharing for gaming, it’s basically the golden standard. The problem started when people started using it as a replacement for forums.

      • @[email protected]
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        19 hours ago

        Where I live, everyone used AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM for short. It was popular with teens because it offered chat rooms, but that meant it was also a popular hunting ground for predators. Nearly every terminally online teen from the late 90’s and early 2000’s has a story about getting groomed on AIM, by someone they initially thought was their own age.

        Then Google Chat and Facebook Messenger came along, (and AOL’s subscriber count began to dwindle as people moved to broadband internet) and it was almost completely dead by 2010.

    • @[email protected]
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      41 day ago

      They intentionally killed it, when it wasn’t theirs, it was a nuisance, when it was theirs, it wasn’t a nuisance, but also not too useful.

      It’s about control, I think.

      I mean, without Skype going bad would all these <censored> IMs, especially Telegram, become so popular?

        • @[email protected]
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          123 hours ago

          Yes, which makes me wonder on the old question if it’s possible to create a distributed IM as prolific as bittorrent protocol.

          In that last example they did something right. At some point I liked ed2k+kad and would swear at bittorrent for not incorporating search, reputation and such as basic components, but maybe that’s what made torrents survive when other filesharing tools went out of common knowledge.

          I’m going to think on this.

    • @[email protected]
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      121 day ago

      It also cobbled in groups from Exchange, and the Collab site from SharePoint. Its pretty much three raccoons in a trench-coat.

  • katy ✨
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    251 day ago

    I think Microsoft killed Skype like 20 years ago.

  • @[email protected]
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    191 day ago

    I forgot Skype still exists. They killed it a long time ago, now they will just make it official

  • @[email protected]
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    121 day ago

    It’s amazing how they fumbled this. There was a time when video calls were Skype. Everybody was using Skype, everybody had it installed, people used it to chat and then … something happened. Microsoft did nothing. Or did the wrong kind of stuff. Software started to suck. And when the pandemic came, Zoom took over and nobody even tried to use Skype. That really, really are some bad business decisions there

    • @[email protected]
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      81 day ago

      It didn’t “start to suck”, they intentionally transitioned it, from old lean clients working over p2p usable in unbelievably bad connectivity conditions, to something server-based and fat laggy clients with typical Microsoft quality. They they turned off authentication servers for the old Skype.

      If the old Skype were still functional today, nobody would say it sucks. OK, maybe no stickers and such.

      • @[email protected]
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        21 day ago

        i realize i haven’t been able to send files for years now because all the p2p platforms have disappeared.

        • @[email protected]
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          123 hours ago

          https://lemmy.world/comment/15367515 - yes ; so I think the idea of an IM that could replace it with the functionality normal for it belongs not to the tech realm (all parts solved separately), but to social studies and market studies realm. Somehow there is a technology that has defeated all competition thrown at it, it’s called bittorrent.

        • sunzu2
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          123 hours ago

          The way internet got developed does make you wonder if it could have been done better if it weren’t for grifter class always engineering shit to middle man.

          Here is some free cloud boy, enjoy, trust me, I will never sell your data and start charging fees while degrading quality of this great thing.