this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 14 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago

Or, if it was named by users of Microsoft products:

New Teams (2) Final-Final (1) Final-THIS ONE

[–] [email protected] 36 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 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] 29 points 17 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 17 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

They killed it as soon as they acquired it.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

It became a bloated pile of garbage after they bought it. Remember how horrible the app became with battery usage??

[–] [email protected] 160 points 1 day ago (3 children)

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

[–] corsicanguppy 2 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 hours ago

Well, bad news for your skype-faucet. Water will stop running in Mai.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 21 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] corsicanguppy 3 points 12 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 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] 3 points 14 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] 36 points 20 hours ago

The bigger headline is "Skype hasn't been dead this whole time"

[–] [email protected] 10 points 16 hours ago

I totally forgot it exists, meaning I thought it was already dead.

[–] [email protected] 89 points 1 day ago (4 children)

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] 36 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Skype for business was not skype, it was lync, they just renamed it after the acquisition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skype_for_Business

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 21 hours ago (3 children)

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] 1 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago)

God it's like Gavin Fucking Belson at Hooli is running shit

[–] [email protected] 5 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 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] 5 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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 IMs, especially Telegram, become so popular?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 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.

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[–] [email protected] 36 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

They just reskinned it and slapped irc in it and called it teams

[–] [email protected] 14 points 22 hours ago

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

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

My feelings on this:

You wish now that our places had been exchanged, that I had died and Skype had lived~~___~~

[–] myusernameis 7 points 18 hours ago (1 children)
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[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 day ago

I think Microsoft killed Skype like 20 years ago.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Skype? Wasn't this the buggy voice chat?

[–] corsicanguppy 3 points 12 hours ago

Yeah, for about a week. It's been awesome for the 20 years since. I've used it on some really shitty internet on a weekly-to-daily basis and I've only been amazed at its reliability.

So it stands to reason in 2025 America that we need to destroy something just because it works and works well.

You shoulda tried it. Too bad. It dynamically switched codecs based on congestion, it punched through nats like none before it; it just worked.

None of this "Skype in name" Lync mess.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago

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

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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] 10 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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] 2 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

Everything is centralized and able to be tracked. That is not intentional

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 18 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago

That's fine I'll just use Lync.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 17 hours ago

Who? Never heard of him

[–] [email protected] 7 points 23 hours ago

Forgot it was even still around.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 18 hours ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

Reportedly? It's been dead since (in case of Linux) version ~~8~~4.3 (just to hint at its age, it's in Qt 4 and supports ALSA) stopped logging in.

Exchanging files via Skype was very easy. Roleplaying in groupchats.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 23 hours ago (4 children)

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.

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