Seriously, go use products like Google Hangouts, Slack or Microsoft Teams (Microsofts's surprisingly better clone of Slack) and then tell me that Skype was ruined by integrating with Microsoft's other product base. The closest argument you might be able to make is that Skype could have developed new features or updated its UI and stayed competitive, but that wouldn't give them the competitive edge that it's competitors nearly all had in terms of being backed by major tech companies. Additionally, the major revenue source was Business tier use, which Microsoft dramatically improved by integrating it with their other cloud-based business suite applications.
Microsoft didn't kill Skype, if anything they extended its life expectancy and value in markets that actually paid to use it. It's dead/dying now because better tools have been developed and marketed to replace it. That's just standard product life cycle.
Personal experience, but I have not found a single person who likes MS Teams. Usually people around me say that Slack is ok-ish, while MS Teams is crap.
I've the misfortune of being forced to use Skype and I would kill to have it replaced with Teams at my workplace.
There is a half-baked link between Skype and Lync to make it seem like it's the same product. This link is all shitty mainly because Lync and Skype work completely differently, and even simple things like call signaling have to deal with years of legacy Microsoft SIP extensions that were punched into Lync.
I remember the first time we received access to the Lync code repository. That stuff was a multi-GB (!!!) repository that contained files, promo videos, PDFs, code, etc. That tells you much about the development practices behind Lync.
It's not great, but in the corporate space, Teams does an OK job, and MS is a reputable company for B2B.
Corporate standard at my place of work. I hate Hangouts with a passion. It's the worst messenger, feature- and UI- wise that I've seen for years.
> Microsoft Teams (Microsofts's surprisingly better clone of Slack)
No it isn't. Used Teams at another company which adopted it as the standard. Couple of years ago. Feature-wise it was like a proof of concept, very early access.
> Additionally, the major revenue source was Business tier use, which Microsoft dramatically improved by integrating it with their other cloud-based business suite applications.
Again, I worked at another company where Skype for Business was the standard and nobody ever used it unless they needed formal IT help or something.
All the teams I'm acquainted with at my current place refuse to communicate on Hangouts and, in violation of corporate policies use something else like Slack or Mattermost.
You have to understand that the technology underlying Skype at the time was very brittle and poorly designed.
Google almost bought Skype before Microsoft did and backed out after they got a look at the code.
When Microsoft acquired it Skype was routing its traffic over port 80 for example.
__I have to understand__ ?
Who is saying this? do you have any credentials / knowledge of Skype technology? My understanding is that you only report indirect discussion from "your friends who worked on it"?
Having been there, I would say quite the opposite.
Skype had pretty intricate means to bypass NAT to NAT clients. I would even go as far as saying that Skype P2P connectivity tricks were top notch, considering the incredible amount of different network setups that clients could face. Even in the weirdest conditions, you could trust your Skype client to somehow find a way to get the call through. This was through an immense collection of in-house-trial-and-error-STUN-hole-punching like techniques.
Now I can understand that for people outside of the peer to peer connectivity world, these techniques could seem completely foreign and brittle, but it's not. It's the world of internet clients we live in. It's not related to Skype, it's the route all peer to peer clients have to deal with. If you don't want that, don't go peer to peer.
> Google almost bought Skype before Microsoft did and backed out after they got a look at the code.
Where did you get that information? I had never heard of that interpretation of the story before.
My view on this is that Google considered buying Skype, but backed up because they wanted to have a cloud based service, instead of a p2p one. Microsoft was in the same state of mind, but decided to go along and migrate Skype to be a cloud service, which they did.
Now if you really want to discuss technical details and the state of Microsoft/Azure at that time, I would be pleased to do so.
Microsoft started the migration of Skype to the cloud at a time Azure was just a big beta test. Nothing was working properly, the tools were sub-par or in-existent. Nothing was reliable. You would deploy Azure services through remote desktop automated by PowerShell scripts. Managing databases was done through in-browser silverlight clients - yes, that was already EOL at the time, but that was the only way to perform DB queries with a UI.
When complaining about the deplorable half-baked status of the tooling and cloud services that we were required to use to migrate Skype, the only response was "Yeahhh, Eat your own dog food".
Thanks but no thanks.
All the great Skype engineers left in the two years after the start of the migration to Azure - mostly to join Twilio.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/2011/05/why-googl...
Key points:
He did not think Skypes p2p communication was a good fit for Google, going so far as to say it ate up bandwidth and was like an old technology.
The PM's remarks could be summarized as saying the basic p2p communication architecture was overly and only used in order to avoid a cloud/server based architecture.
Basically, the PM thought Skypes architecture and code base couldn't effectively scale or meet real world business requirements that people would pay for.
Like VCs who try to invest in a company but lose the deal (or never get to see it at all): "Oh FooBbarApp? Yeah, we passed"
Put another way, if both sides block 80 incoming, their only hope is fancy NAT-punching techniques.
But those NAT-punching tricks are useless if they are using a port that is completely blocked on the outbound side.
“On 10 May 2011, Microsoft Corporation acquired Skype Communications, S. à r.l for US$8.5 billion”
I think Microsoft has changed significantly in the last decade.
I’m quietly hopeful the npm acquisition will go well for us (although I still hold some serious grudges about Microsoft’s past behaviour).
Thats not the important thing, thats the problem. Npm could easily be an open source client. Contain less code and be better. And have a mirors system like every other repo so it does not need money for hosting.
Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it. And they have.
Microsoft purchased that control and plan to make money out of it.
This is bad news for OS dev.
The NPM client is and has always been open source: https://github.com/npm/cli.
> Npm wanted to control nodejs and make money out it. And they have.
In what way, other than offering private package hosting for enterprises?
What does this even mean?
No interest in mirrors from day one.
Npm sold out to Microsoft and got paid. All that free community effort to stop Npms "crashiness" got sold to Microsoft for dollar.
Nodejs went to the Linux foundation.
Npm went to Microsoft.
Suprised?
You said they controlled nodejs, and that they somehow earned money by controlling nodejs. I think that neither of those has ever been the case.
That's what we said about the Skype acquisition too.
"It's different this time, it will run independently, for once Microsoft won't interfere and destroy the acquired company".
3 years later (I was there), 50% of Skype original management and developers left. All the major new projects of Skype turn out to be integration with the endless already existing Microsoft products: integration with Link, integration with microsoft ID, integration with Microsoft UI, etc...
5 years later, Skype is dead... but everyone left already.
Good job Microsoft.