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Microsoft Businesses

Microsoft Promises New Skype Features Despite Teams For Consumers Launch (venturebeat.com) 75

Posted by msmash from the betting-on-165-horses dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has shared few usage numbers since acquiring Skype for $8.5 billion in October 2011. Skype's monthly active users, for example, haven't been updated since August 2015 -- 300 million has been the number for years. But the coronavirus has shaken up the communications space for everyone, even Skype. With usage exploding due to COVID-19 and working from home policies, the company has been eager to talk up Skype along with Microsoft Teams, its fastest-growing business app ever. Microsoft has now confirmed plans to invest in Skype, including adding new features, regardless of its plans with Teams.
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Microsoft Promises New Skype Features Despite Teams For Consumers Launch More

Microsoft Promises New Skype Features Despite Teams For Consumers Launch

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  • The company I work for (a rather large fintech firm) switched everyone to Teams from Zoom a year ago (apparently "trust issues" even before the recent controversies). Works reasonably well, but last I knew regarding Skype (and so presumably Teams), Microsoft isn't even asserting they aren't monitoring or capturing your video/text traffic.

    I'd prefer Jami in that respect, but seems it has some scaling issues.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rldp ( 6381096 )

      Microsoft is in a jurisdiction that they can seek legal remedy in.

      You can't sue a chinese company.

      Apparently the suits are a little more on the ball than you are.

      • Thanks for the gratuitous insult miss, but I said I'd prefer Jami, which is open source with fully reviewable code.

      • Wow. The racism is crawling out of the woodwork. Zoom is an American company, headquartered in California.

        Yes, it is started by a chinese man. That automatically makes it a chinese company?

  • Teams (Score:5, Informative)

    by MasseKid ( 1294554 ) on Monday May 25, 2020 @08:48PM (#60104032)
    We made the switch. While I don't think teams is the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is a million times better than skype.

    • Re:Teams (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Monday May 25, 2020 @10:23PM (#60104186)

      If that's what you're using it for, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

      Skype is the best soft phone on the market, though. I pay ~$14/m for unlimited calling to Thailand.

    • Teams occupies a strange space. It can be used for meetings or collaboration, but not really both at the same time. It can be used as a calendar, like outlook, but without all the features. You can use it for instant chat, but it's highly unsuccessful at this compared to something like MSN Messenger. Skype used to be quite good for messaging, but MS have made that progressively more difficult to access. Perhaps the most interesting part of Teams is it's only found success because MS makes it too difficult
      • Yes, that is my experience, too. Migration to consolidated communication platform is laudable idea, but it feels like cut many corners to get there, not porting many of the previously existing useful features. Teams is missing some basic productivity features that Skype for business had. To me, the most annoying "features" (i.e. lack of features) of Teams are: * (1) You cannot have multiple parallel chats (as a separate windows), instead you have to be switching from interaction with one person to intera

      • Ha, true. I was working at home just before the shutdown and was trying to work from my home computer for email and meetings. First thing I tried was to install Skype for Business. There was no way I could find to download it because all the places to get it redirect you to Teams, and if you didn't know better you might assume that Microsoft has dumped Skype for Business in the same way that Google dumped most of its apps. I could find Skype easily though (the non business one).

        (OMG, the meeting has bee

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Same observation here, teams is pretty usable (probably MS bought it or did not use their normal development processes), while Lync is now typical unreliable MS crapware with obscure problems and obscure functionality.

    • Skype sucks. And Team sucks. They just suck differently. Skype on OSX sucks and Microsoft has no plans to fix this, and so it has literally stopped working for some team members until they can get back into the office and have IT figure it out. Teams on the other hand is an outlier, it does not walk, talk, or quack like any other Microsoft or Office applicaiton and so it just feels very very weird. It very clearly discards the Office look and feel and goes for what I assume is a Windows 10 style, and the

  • Not leaving Zoom if I can help it (Score:4, Interesting)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Monday May 25, 2020 @08:51PM (#60104036)

    Maybe it's just me, but I'd rather get a hundred thousand paper cuts on my face, than switch to a Microsoft product for pretty much anything if there are any good alternatives - and Zoom is a perfectly fine alternative.

    Zoom is even better as far as I can tell so far, although I've only been on a handful of Team video chats so far. It was fine but not as fully featured as Zoom.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Zoom is hardly a "good" alternative, Security wise that is like calling ritual suicide a good alternative to catching Covid.

  • It's weird (Score:3)

    by rldp ( 6381096 ) on Monday May 25, 2020 @08:53PM (#60104044)

    Teams is better in every way but the developers here refuse to use it, even working remotely.

    How do I explain the use of a persistent chat log, and the ability to work as a team to them, other than saying "it has a persistent chat log and better team abilities?"

    Desktop sharing is better, big meetings are better. I'm no teams salesman, but skype is a lost cause and everyone with a brain knows that. All these guys want is skype chats and email chains that wind up in the spam box.

    Not worth the fight, but I was really hoping the remote work thing would work out, and could show everyone how much better things could be, and how much more could get done.

    • I suspect people that want to use skype are subject to the sunk cost fallacy, because it took them a long time to set it up into a working condition.

    • Maybe they want anything they're expected to know to be in those emails, so they can search for the information in one place. And not having a chat log in the other place means you won't try to lazily dump information on them there, they can tell you to email it so they have it.

      And why are emails from known contacts ending up in your spam folder? Are you using hotmail or something?

      It sounds to me like you don't understand their needs, and when you say "explain" you really mean "get my way." But really those

      • There is NO search in Teams chat history. The chat search in Skype for Business is right there at the top, difficult to miss. Teams is still a proof-of-concept and needs a long ways to go before it's a real product. It honestly feels like a wannabe competitor from a startup.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Because people don't like change and are resistant to it, even if the replacement is significantly better.
      If you don't force them, they won't change...

      On the other hand, there are plenty of instances where a replacement is inferior to what it replaced and the change has been forced through anyway.

      • Teams is not superior though. It has slightly better voice at times, but everything else feels worse. The files/notes/whatever stuff is nice, but Onenote does that, and the calendar is ok but Outlook does it better, and the meeting/chat stuff is so-so and Skype for Business does it better. The only purpose I can see for Teams seems to be to prepare the way to making Office obsolete.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Bert64 ( 520050 )

          The trend seems to be aiming for integrated mediocrity rather than decent separate tools...
          Outlook was never a good mail client or calendar for instance, it just integrated half assed implementations together.

          Teams seems to be a kneejerk response to slack, but in typical microsoft fashion is an inferior copy with tighter integration into their existing stack.

          The difficult part for slack is that they depend on microsoft for probably a significant majority of their customer base yet microsoft have now become

          • Microsoft has this attitude that they are experts at everything, and that they need to be the leader in everything, including stuff they've never attempted before. They don't understand the simple idea of sticking to what they're best at. There's no need to compete with Slack, which is odd also since it's not even the same category of product, there's a small overlap in features only but Microsoft wants to kill it just because ithey think they must be dominant.

            A few years back the company I was at had a n

    • What Skype are you comparing it to? Skype for business or consumer Skype? If the former, the usual justification is that it is able to be hosted, whereas with Teams you're forced to use MS's cloud. If the latter, then it really is probably just inertia, although I don't understand your point about persistent chat - Skype has had that pretty much ever since MS took over and got rid of the old peer-to-peer chat tech, which was definitely a change for the better. I also feel like on the whole Skype still has a
      • Sorry meant "non-techie" people, not "join-techie"

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        One of the worst things MS did was rebrand Office Communicator/Lync to Skype for Business. S4B and Skype have nothing in common with each other and the branding made discussion of Skype for Business very confusing. 'Skype for Business' is a mouthful and so everyone wants to shorten it to Skype, and then it's just uselessly ambiguous.

        I've shared the same frustration of people insisting on continuing to use S4B despite Teams being available. Piss poor image copy/paste, maddening conversation history managemen

        • I've got the opposite view. Teams seems like the inadequate replacement for S4B, it's not as good in just about every way. Maybe it's Teams on OSX, but there is literally no conversation history management. Screen sharing is mostly the same between both. The only reason we are starting to use Teams for meetings is that S4B under OSX is failing for a few people who can't bring the laptop into work for IT to fix. And S4B is better than Lync, so if you say they're the same then MS has done a lot of improv

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Junta ( 36770 )

            Note that I use Teams under Linux under Chrome (the App ironically is worse, despite it being pretty much just a bundled web browser and application). I have used S4B under Windows and Teams under Windows. Screen share under windows and S4B will flake out sometimes, happily presenting a black screen. On it's best day, it can't share by window, it can only share by app, limiting my flexibility compared to Chrome that will happily allow me to select specific window instead of by application.

            On conversation hi

            • Hmm, I found zero methods of searching anything in Teams. Literally no way to search, either within a conversation or across them. Maybe there's some obscure way to do this, and there is company Teams training coming up and I'll ask it there. But searching through all S4B conversations (ie, IM chats) is very easy. At least for the OSX versions.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by Junta ( 36770 )

                This is because they overloaded the behavior of the text entry box in a pretty dumb way.

                In that 'Search or Type a command box' that starts autocompleting contact names in a drop down, if you type your search and hit 'enter' it then presents a search results interface across all messages.

                The other maddening thing, you know you want to join a team that's open. So you type it in the 'search box'. Of course that only auto-searches individuals, not teams and upon enter changes to emphasize messages and people as

    • Ok, after rereading your post, it's clear you're talking about Skype for Business (e-mail chains instead of persistent chat), which however has little to do with the article, which is about the consumer version of Skype. It really is a shame that Microsoft has essentially dragged Skype's good name through the mud and eclipsed all the great improvements they've made in the consumer app because they rebranded their forever-and-always crap Lync client to "Skype for Business". Sadly businesses are often loath

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        currently Teams can't be used when self-hosting.

        Is there a hint of that 'currently' ever changing? I was under the impression the Microsoft strategy was 'you will only use our software by renting runtime on our computers from now on'.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

      And the user interface in Teams sucks.

      That's the reason why many developers hates it.

      Given the security and privacy concerns about Zoom - how can we trust other applications like Teams?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by N1AK ( 864906 )

        Given the security and privacy concerns about Zoom - how can we trust other applications like Teams?

        Because at worst Teams has better hidden security flaws, and more likely it is better secured in general. Unless you think it's logical to conclude that as snakes occasionally kill people so you can't risk going near ladybirds.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Z00L00K ( 682162 )

          It's more like if Cobra snakes kills people then other snakes can too.

        • Because many companies already store their family jewels in Microsoft's vaults in the cloud? It's like saying we don't want China to snoop our emails and source code, but it's ok for Microsoft to snoop our stuff because we already know it's evil and have made the appropriate virgin sacrifices to appease it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      How do I explain the use of a persistent chat log, and the ability to work as a team to them, other than saying "it has a persistent chat log and better team abilities?" (...) All these guys want is skype chats and email chains that wind up in the spam box.

      Have you ever worked a place that actually operated successfully that way, or is it just your imagination of what it'd be? Because my experience with "structured chat logs" is that nobody's paying any attention to what's banter and what's significant so what you get is a persistent trash heap. Having a Skype meeting and putting the results in an email compresses away 95% of the fluff. Not that email is a great result, but what I feel is often missing is what structures that information into work tasks, proc

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Junta ( 36770 )

        Teams threaded chat is terrible. You can have Teams and can further subdivide that into channels and then you have the option to turn someone else's chat into a thread and it's just a mess.

        It might work better if threads get largely taken out of the 'channel' and get represented as a distinct child of a channel, then at least you don't have half the people clicking the 'reply to thread' button and the other half just typing new chats into channel.

        I personally think the whole concept of threaded chat is over

    • No, it's not. I don't need or want a bloated application for chat with SharePoint and the kitchen sink thrown in. I was perfectly happy with Pidgin, but Teams' "threaded chat" (which is totally unnecessary, and nobody's going to use around here because they won't understand it) doesn't jive with conventional chat models and therefore there's no plugin for it.

    • But Skype for Business does all that, and does it better.

  • fix the UI first (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I use skype once every few weeks, every time I see the person I want to call listed and spend thirty seconds hunting around to figure out how to start a voice call to that person. They should fix the user interface before adding features.

    Also everyone should use an end to end encrypted voip system, not skype.

    • I have to assume you're talking about Skype for Business, because the consumer version of Skype is simple enough that even my parents have no trouble using it.

  • It's a hot mess, and made even worse by your stupid decision to rebrand Lync as "Skype for Business" - so you've got two different "Skypes" which aren't completely compatible.

    At this point the merciful thing would be to just let it die.

    • If you have customers using it, then it makes sense to keep it around, because a lot of those customers will switch to Zoom if you don't.

      • You have a point, but it's also not a painless decision. From what I've experienced, lots of people don't understand the Skype / Skype for Business split. So you get people using one of the products to join meetings on the other product, then finding out they can't use particular features during the call.

    • The Skype phone replacement features aren't replicated anywhere else, and MS doesn't have a successful mobile offering.

      It makes more sense to naturally shift the "Skype for Business" customers to Teams by advertising Teams features, and then add more phone-type features to Skype to re-establish the brand difference.

      MS isn't going to dump a solid brand on the floor; they're not Google.

    • What's a hot mess exactly? Business or consumer Skype? I find the UI of the consumer version pretty simple and well-thought-out tbh, ymmv tho of course.

  • Left Skype because of feature creep (Score:5, Insightful)

    by WoodstockJeff ( 568111 ) on Monday May 25, 2020 @10:06PM (#60104162) Homepage

    We used Skype for years for inter- and intra-office communications. We left it because Microsoft insisted on "upgrading it" to be "just like" phone apps we did NOT want to use. It went from a desktop app that had a phone interface to a phone app with a web interface.

    Once the v7 client was officially locked out, we transitioned to Zoom. It really was not that much better, but it wasn't Skype.

    So "upgrading" Skype isn't going to get people like our company back, since the original "upgrades" were what drove us away.

    Our next step is going to be setting up our own open-source chat server, once Zoom frustrates us enough with its recent security fixes. If we needed absolute security, we wouldn't be using SOMEONE ELSE'S SERVER to do it.

    • The desktop Skype client still works fine on Linux, maybe you never had to switch to a phone app after all?

      But yeah, it seems odd not to have your own servers just for talking to your coworkers.

    • You're talking about Skype for Business, aka rebranded Lync. The article is about consumer Skype, which is a completely different piece of software with a much better user experience.

      • The original Skype is what we used, starting shortly after it was founded, back in the "peer to peer" days, and prior to eBay's control.

        One of our clients wanted us to "upgrade" to SfB/Lync, but we told them no, phone calls and email were better.

  • When Skype was new it was really simple and intuitive. Then Microsoft bought it and it never worked as reliably since. So will Zoom be bought by Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, or Microsoft?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kisai ( 213879 )

      It hasn't worked the same since eBay bought it. It still did peer-to-peer connections and supernodes when eBay still owned it. I'm not sure if those features still exist in it now. It's always had ads in it up until relatively recently (when they made a Win10 "app" version), because up to that point the ads were in it and were responsible for the memory leaking, and who knows what personal information leaks.

  • Skype is on the way out, and it is likely to be relegated back to just being an IP phone IP-to-landline bridge. Like it should have been.

    Skype doesn't scale with more users, especially when they are all speaking. Worse when there are 25+ people in a skype chat.

    Slack, Teams, and even Discord have all taken up the space where Skype used to be good. Teams in particular is such a rip off of Slack that people who are familiar with Slack before hand think they're using Slack initially.

  • Here's a feature I want: (Score:3)

    by newcastlejon ( 1483695 ) on Monday May 25, 2020 @11:17PM (#60104266)

    Interoperability.

    I want to be able to use Skype to call a FaceTime user or vice-versa. I want in on the Zoom fad, but I don't want to have to install half a dozen different apps. I want to clip a simple camera on my TV so my family can stay in touch with one another.

    Video calling went from sci-fi to a plausible reality in the 90's. Why isn't it ubiquitous by now?!

    • Interoperability.

      Yeah, that's never going to happen.

    • Interoperability.

      I want to be able to use Skype to call a FaceTime user or vice-versa. I want in on the Zoom fad, but I don't want to have to install half a dozen different apps. I want to clip a simple camera on my TV so my family can stay in touch with one another.

      Video calling went from sci-fi to a plausible reality in the 90's. Why isn't it ubiquitous by now?!

      Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/ [xkcd.com]

  • If Teams and Skype are considered competitors, then there is a problem in vision. For me teams is akin to Slack or Discord, whereas Skype is akin to FaceTime or WhatsApp.

    I haven’t used Skype (the non-Lync version) that much since it didn’t get proper maintenance and made using ‘Skype Out’ hard to use. On the Mac it won’t even obey ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode, since 2018 (2017?). A lot broke when they moved to the Electron based version and it I am not convinced it got the

  • But then got really bad.

    Started using skype in 2004 and it was simply the best there was.

    Then under e-bay and such it continued to be ok,

    Other programs gaining in most areas, but as people I knew were on skype, I used mostly it.

    Then Microsoft acquired it and the downhill started.

    At first it was just occasionally new clients that did not work and such, but using the old client and the service still worked.

    Then the service it self started to glitch.. like one side of a chat not being able see what the other

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