I use Skype for Business and not only is it very poorly coded/architected, but the design paradigms actually make communication harder.

Actually I like it better than any alternative we have use so far (NIH InHouse solutions, NetMeeting, Sametime, WebEx).

When I worked there even people at Cisco hated WebEx.our team used hangouts instead.

For a while, I really loved hangouts... but Google has kind of dropped the ball, pulling out some of the integrated features (SMS, and Google Voice integration), and/or obfuscating those features. It used to be far easier to actually use for most of your communications. I also really preferred the integrated comms, so that I could keep hangouts and sms messages from a single contact together.

Totally agree.

That's probably Skype for Business, aka Lync though. Weren't they actually separate code bases?

If they are, it's still incredibly terrible. An enormous list of common glitches could be written about it, that just never get patched

For one, it tends to split group convos into random tabs at random intervals, black hole messages, crash randomly and silently and you don't notice until someone says you're offline(the window will still open! it's just hung), etc etc.

Clearly they must be using Lync or Skype to coordinate fixing them too -- just can't find the right tab to resume the conversations.