- baatliwala@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
Amazing how Skype went from a verb to the shadow realm. MS could’ve done so much more.
1 yearWord on the street is that MS couldn’t harvest the data they wanted out of Skype, even after turning off the encryption. So they let the Skype team keep on going because of reasons, while silently replacing them with teams.
- frunch@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
Would seem almost intentional given the size and success of the company. How do you fuck something like that up so badly? Seems like one of those Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deals or similar
- IsThisAnAI@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
Skype was always shit. It was being first to market that made it popular. It was one of the first ways to get cheaper and free informational calling. By the time MS purchased it vent and ts became popular as well as zoom and others entering the space.
- boreengreen@lemm.eeEnglish1 year
One of the things skype did first and best was decent noise filtering, transforming peoples shit audio equipment to something you could listen to for more than 5 minutes without going crazy.
- IsThisAnAI@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
For sure, Skype/eBay did a lot right at first. But by the time MS bought it, it was already falling from favor.
Mumble existed then, and still exists now. Vent was literally never clean, it was always bloated and behind.
(sorry, I’m very passionate about the Vent vs. Ts vs. Mumble debacle of the early aughts)
- warbond@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
I agree with you here. They just never kept up with what people wanted or needed out of a communications platform. When Discord showed it was more versatile nearly 10 years ago, my whole group switched and never looked back.
Skype call sounds still bring specific kinds of nostalgia though.
- IsThisAnAI@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
They treated it as an extension of the telephone is how I always thought about it.
Immigration Canada: “Prove to us that your marriage is genuine. Prove that it wasn’t for immigration purposes.”
My wife and I: “You sure you want that?”
Immigration Canada: “Make with the proof.”
My wife and I: 400 pages, front and back, of Skype call logs/timestamps. A fucking literal ream of paper
- SplashJackson@lemmy.caEnglish1 year
I think they just wanted you to perform a verification fuck
I would
- BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.worksEnglish1 year
I would
What, like droit du seigneur? In Denmark it caused a lot of debacle, when people receiving Danish citizenship, had to shake hands with the local mayor during the ceremony. But I do reckon that having to fuck the mayor to get citizenship, would be too much for even the most right wing … nuts
- neon_nova@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish1 year
I don’t want to say the country, but when I went with my wife for me to get residency via marriage, this is how it went.
Immigration Officer: Do you have any questions? Me: No Immigration Officer: Sign here and come back in a month with your passport to implement the visa Me: Uhh… That’s it? OK Bye.
- Viri4thus@feddit.orgEnglish1 year
Ah yes, typical MS handling acquisitions. What a cancer of a company, metastasising everywhere and as much as you want to get better, it just won’t dissappear. Antitrust oversight is a joke…
- Mad_Punda@feddit.orgEnglish1 year
I’ve been using Skype for cheaper international calls to family that still relies on phones instead of video calls etc. I’ll need to check what happens with my credit. Any recommendations for an alternative?
- Dettweiler@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish1 year
I’m not a fan of Meta, but all of my international family rely heavily on WhatsApp.
It also seems that Signal supports VoIP calling, but I have not tried it.
- Mad_Punda@feddit.orgEnglish1 year
Well, I have family that is old enough not to manage to use WhatsApp. They have a smartphone. WhatsApp is set up. I can never reach them on it.
- Mad_Punda@feddit.orgEnglish1 year
No, but Skype allows to make calls to landlines (and mobile phones).
Google Voice is good. I use it to call from the USA to Australia which is only $0.01/minute and doesn’t have any monthly fees. You can see the rates here: https://voice.google.com/rates
I’ve got an Android phone and you can configure Google Voice so that it’s automatically used whenever you make an international call from your phone’s regular dialer.
It’s a little contentious, but Discord is a solid video chat app. It’s good for hop in/hop out for multiple users and you can have a dedicated family chat room on the server too. Very device compatible and resource friendly, and totally free.
- ECB@feddit.orgEnglish1 year
I only have to use this occasionally, but on my android I use the app “Talkatone” to make free calls to phones. They have paid plans to keep your number, but I tend to just use new ones whenever one expires.
It might not suit your needs, but it’s worked pretty reliably for me for the past 10 years or so.
yep, i was always under the assumption they bought it for parts to use in teams.
- kautau@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
Well yeah “shutting down” here is more like “absorbed” into teams. They don’t make “enough” money from consumers to keep it going, but they do from their teams subscriptions. The tech is and will further be ported to teams and the branding changed.
I’m still sad they got rid of MSN Messenger in favour of Skype. MSN had superior video and audio quality.
I had so many international friends on MSN Messenger that I have no idea how to contact any more.
- Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
Wait…MICROSOFT owns skype??? Was this always the case, or did they do something stupid where they bought skype during the heyday, and immediately tank it just a few years before the pandemic? Because Zoom really had a field day in 2020.
So, which is it? Did they always own it, or were they a buyer of an established skype that tanked it like Verizon did with tumblr? Or that other company did with myspace?
If I remember correctly MS bought it from eBay. And then promptly did their best job at taking a dump on it. Nothing MS did to Skype was good, disabled encryption by default, removed features, made the network so terrible that they actually make you consider teams. At one point Skype was the only game in town for personal web calls and chats, in the US at least. MS pissed that away, because killing competition and owning patents is more lucrative than creating good products and services.
- jonne@infosec.pubEnglish1 year
Also forced people to use a Microsoft account to use it, and they definitely messed something up in the migration.
- 1 year
The biggest thing they did to kill it was banner ads in the client. The second those showed up, all my friends and myself instantly jumped to the new, fledgling Discord.
Which very quickly started to add the occasional banner and constantly push nitro. It fucking sucks.
Is there a defederated version which doesn’t constantly drop quality and connection like discord does?
- beerclue@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
They’ve owned it since 2011. When they did buy it, they had Lync, which sucked pretty bad. Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.
Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.
And the resulting horror show is just as bad as you’d imagine to :/
- gramie@lemmy.caEnglish1 year
I remember a theory that the US government asked Microsoft to purchase Skype and change it from p2p to server-based, so that they could intercept decrypted communications.
Skype was originally made by a European company (Latvian?).
- Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
Ya know, as far as conspiracy theories go, this isn’t hard to believe might be true. I could see that. I mean, I don’t know either way what the truth is, but it’s not like you’re saying the moonlanding was actually first done by bigfoot, and it’s kept under wraps to promote the cold war. See the difference is, I actually DO know about the bigfoot one. That’s real. That happened. The government lies about bigfoot on the moon!
My father, who worked for a huge computer manufacturer, was once approached by two young dudes asking for a server for their new startup. He listened to their proposition but couldn’t see how they were going to stay in business, so he turned them down and they went elsewhere for their hardware.
This was the two founders of Skype, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, some 20 years ago.
- Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
Your dad after hearing Skype will shut down: “FINALLY!!! This nightmare can finally end.”
- ramenshaman@lemmy.worldEnglish1 year
Skype is what I usually use to video chat with them but I recently got my mom to download Signal, which is nice
- 1 year
That sucks. This is my main way of video-calling my family overseas. It’s also gonna suck for people who use it for 2fa for US accounts (though I think most don’t work with Skype and known voip numbers anymore so maybe not a huge deal).
It also sucks for those of us who need to call US numbers from overseas. I need to call a tax prep company and would rather not pay a fortune. Google also cracked down on those proven to be fully overseas with a voice number.
- oldfart@lemm.eeEnglish1 year
There are so many cheap voip services that give US numbers. Jmp.chat is the one I know but there’s a lot.
Call your family on Whereby or Jitsi Meet. 10 years ago calling using a website could be a shock experience for non technical people, but by now I think everyone has used Zoom or MS Teams or something like that, so it should feel familiar.
