That’s fine I’ll just use Lync.
Forgot it was even still around.
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…
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.
Skype for business is Skype in name only. It’s basically Office communicator with several name changes
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.
Skype for business was not skype, it was lync, they just renamed it after the acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business
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.
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?
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
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.
Lololol Skype was already dying when eBay fucked up. Hardcore revisionism here.
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.
I would say this heavily depends on the region. In Germany, I knew nobody who used MSN, everyone only used ICQ.
That’s why I said around these parts. Back then there was a lot more regional fragmentation.
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.
Man, I miss icq…
God it’s like Gavin Fucking Belson at Hooli is running shit
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.
It seems like a very underrated feature but Skype’s overseas calling feature was great and the 60 mins I get each month with 365 was really nice. Them getting rid of that basically made Skype useless.
I have a load of credit on there still (got tricked by them deactivating my credit and topped up unnecessarily). I still use it for international calls at least once a month, I hope this news story is overblown.
Do your credits still exist? I was under the impression that they phased out the credit system.
Yes, I still have it showing up in Windows/Android, and phone numbers show their cost per minute.
Oh that’s neat, hope you can use them up soon or get a reimbursement of some sort. They just announced formally that they’re shutting the service down.
Ding dong the witch is dead
They just reskinned it and slapped irc in it and called it teams
It also cobbled in groups from Exchange, and the Collab site from SharePoint. Its pretty much three raccoons in a trench-coat.
They are not killing Skype, they just now bury the corpse. Skype died by malnutrion and bad parenting by MS a decade 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…
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
I find 365 to be a terrible mess if applications, outlook and teams have a calendar separate to the calendar app. Teams sucks
Teams is skype4biz, which was Lync, which was MSCommunicator…which was a shitty netMeeting.
The Skype you seen in Teans[sic] is not the same animal.
I used it only the other day. Worked flawlessly.
In related news, when I turned on the tap in my kitchen, water still came out. And it’s been installed for yeeears.
Well, bad news for your skype-faucet. Water will stop running in Mai.
Who? Never heard of him
Good! They could have cornered the market during Covid, but fumbled the ball.
When COVID started there already where shitload of apps that could do voice. They killed it long time ago by simply making it hard to use, the interface was a complete mess. In the meantime for example there was already Whatsapp dominant with easy to use interface and controls
You mean teams… No! You mean new teams! No! You mean teams for home use and teams for work! No! You mean new experience teams! Maybe you mean blue teams for use on a moving vehicle between 25 and 60mph on a Wednesday with the windows open while talking to exactly 2 or your close friends who are wearing blue blazers and jeans while drinking coffee but not from Starbucks at their house but not the bedroom and having their living rooms painted magenta in water color teams? Is it that teams? I’m a little confused as to what teams I’m using. I only use it at work because fuck no, I will never use it at home.
Or, if it was named by users of Microsoft products:
New Teams (2) Final-Final (1) Final-THIS ONE
I totally forgot it exists, meaning I thought it was already dead.
I still use it to make international calls to family (it’s my only use case for it). Does anyone know of a good replacement (preferably FOSS) that allows calling on landlines (yup, old people still use them)?
Not FOSS but you can check Google Voice and see if the pricing for the country you need to call is convenient
You can do this using JMP Chat, which bridges phone numbers to XMPP. Unfortunately, it’s USA and Canada only, for now.
Alternatively, you can use a “SIP Trunk Provider”. For instance, in the UK, Andrews and Arnold offers this service. You can then connect any compatible SIP client (e.g. Gnome Calls).
In the same boat. Not even just old people; I need to call 800 numbers but it would cost me a ton from Japan. Guess I’m doing that Monday night.
I don’t think Skype numbers are supported as well anymore, but many people rely on services for their US banks and stuff for 2fa as well.
The bigger headline is “Skype hasn’t been dead this whole time”
