No, there's no hint, maybe just some wishful thinking... ðY

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.

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 to switch to Teams for the simple reason that they want to stay self-hosted instead of switching to Office 365, and currently Teams can't be used when self-hosting.

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.

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.

Sorry meant "non-techie" people, not "join-techie"

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 cleaner, simpler and easier to grok UI than Teams, which is why I would always recommend it to join-techie people over Teams if given the choice (and assuming the large team features are irrelevant). The difference between "chats" and "teams" in Teams, and especially the different ways of interacting (threads or no threads) depending on which context you're in, is confusing, and it's annoying that you're always thrown into the near-useless "feed" view on mobile, instead of picking up where you left off. Skype in my experience also has better compensation for microphone feedback and noise cancellation. So in my view there are plenty of reasons - as a consumer user - to prefer Skype over Teams.

I have already encountered 2 different companies/organizations with transformer projects that do exactly that - translate COBOL to Java. And this is within the last 3 years alone - just in Austria. The end result is probably near unreadable for a "normal" Java developer, but much easier to deploy on any software/hardware stack you like and in theory easier to modify/extend with new Java code. It's just a shame that every such effort seems to limited to individual closed-source islands, from the perspective of endlessly reinventing the wheel - since I guess a complete open-source solution could have been available and much more mature by this point in time, if anyone have a damn. IBM is no help since they are interested in keeping mainframes in business as long as possible. But despite the fact that an open source solution would seem logical, each company refuses to share their products because it's either a cash cow (consulting company's point of view) and/or it gives them an "edge", or they're just not interested in open source and its associated hassles as long as their own applications are working. The development costs are immense, but still nothing compared with keeping the mainframes going into the future.

That's not chrome mobile doing anything special aside from not pretending to be a desktop browser. Really it is Firefox mobile's fault if it's not working with the media queries that developers have built into their sites.

You don't need a gazillion versions. FlatPak is designed to allow multiple versions but share whenever possible.

Read the Peripheral. It is IMO one of his best, not boring, and it's the first book in the current series, of which the new book in the article is the second.

I'm pretty sure they did that because paper is more environmentally friendly to throw away, not recycle. In general dirty/greasy paper is not recyclable.

Sorry, thanks for pointing out my screwup.

My did screw up the China population figure somehow... Even at half that, though, the comparison with Philadelphia is ridiculous.

They are comparing plastic packaging thrown away IN A YEAR by 3.56 billion people in ALL OF CHINA to the total trash produced in Philadelphia, with population of 1.58 million, in a year. That's 860 times more people. What a meaningless figure, yet they manage to make China's problem sound so much more terrible. Notice they don't mention an apples-to-apples comparison with plastic packaging thrown away (not recycled) in the U.S. The U.S. recycles less than 10% of plastics and created 34.5 million tons in 2015, so that's about 31 tons of plastics thrown away, in other words about TWENTY TIMES what all of China, a country with a population four times bigger, creates. But whatever, it's popular at the moment to bash China and rag on them for their environmental issues instead of investigating how fucked up things really are at home.