Single data point: I open Skype for one occasion: Monday night, gaming with friends that - for the lack of a better term - "don't know better" (I'd prefer TeamSpeak or Mumble for Gaming - or any other voice chat that doesn't require a G+ account really).

Skype is slow. Ugly. And worst of all: It shoves ads in my face on multiple levels (popups, banners etc). So far I keep it for this weekly use case, but I hope that I will leave it behind 'real soon now'™.

I've exclusively used Skype for video chat with family (who happened to be in a really infrastructure-poor part of the world) for months - it was by far the only thing that worked, pixelated low-res video notwithstanding. Most of the other clients, e.g. line, gave-up within 30 seconds with errors like "connection is unstable". Getting Skype to connect is a major pain but once it gets going, even though the video sucks, it isn't choppy and the connection doesn't keep dropping.

Also, I never faced any ads with Skype (not sure if that was due to $1.20 balance in my Skype Credit account). The aforementioned calls were over wifi on my side and 2G(?) connections on recipients side, so free.

Your Skype shows ads? I've never seen ads on Skype.

See my sibling. Yes it does.

There seem to be ways to make that go away (null listing hosts either directly in the hosts file or - on Windows - in the Internet Connection Settings). Maybe. Before I'd use that app for anything of value, outside of my Mondays .. I'd try these approaches.

I have never seen a single ad on Skype (Windows, Mac, iOS) when I use my old account, where I have regularly bought SkypeOut credits.

When I created a second account for work with a new client, suddenly ads popped up everywhere.

Not on Mac but it does on Windows.

That's not true at all. I have ads shoved in my face on my Mac continuously. It's bulky & ugly to use (UX-wise), so it's only used for business.

I make myself available on nth number of services because they people I want to talk to are spread across them; Skype is not one of them.

Mine does...

Nope, as a freelancer with a few remote clients here and there, I find almost every client uses Skype. Even the big corp I'm currently contracting for uses Skype for interviews and inter-company communications. So do most of our vendors.

Not in my experience - I've been to several companies using Skype as the primary in-office communication tool and I find it really annoying. Skype is resource-heavy, poor on features and keeps breaking on Linux (management uses Windows, so it doesn't care, but I'm a dev...). I personally refused to use Skype this time (after it kept repeatedly failing on my Ubuntu machine) and made everyone send an e-mail or write me on Facebook if they need something. Works well (though I feel I'm missing on some amount of in-office chat).

I find it more surprising that you'll allowed to use FB for work.

I work in a relatively small company, everyone here has a private Facebook account, and I see no way in which Facebook chat is in any way worse than Skype. Both are closed-source, privately-owned, centralized servivces. But only one of them I tend to have opened anyway, as I use it to communicate with most of the people I know, and I can use it through Emacs when I find myself too distracted by the vanilla version.

I came to say the same thing. With a twist.

Using FB at work is one thing, using FB to communicate with your coworkers another. FB is 'private' for me (as funny as that sounds - there's nothing really private on FB of course, but it's the social life outside of work that I refer to here). Not corporate.

Hey, I don't think you are an outlier. I use Skype for business and the many SMB I work with all use Skype as well. The Skype target audience is the consumer not the SMB. Lync is great, as Jabber is great, but they are all for the Big Fortune 500, not the SMB. I am still looking... and will welcome new "Skype Killer" initiatives.

Despite of that, I don't think Wire is it. I downloaded the app and it is quite awful to use. We need a "Skype Killer" with better usability for business, not only a pretty screen and a good marketing landing page.

We're builing that. Give it a month or so, will spam HN. Want to beta test? :-)

Yes.

Yes

I've never used Skype for anything personal, only for business communications and only when the other party required it.

this is clearly not b2b

i like to joke there are two types of tech companies, mutually exclusive.

- profit driven

- investor money driven

skype is a profit company. wire is clearly investor money driven.

So while your example is valid, i don't think they want to displace the corporate consumer that creates the bulky of skype profit. It probably wants to go after the users that uses snapchat/wasup/etc for free, with little revenue besides what is necessary for a "revenue" round A/B/C/IPO deck, and get investor money/get acquired.

PS: while skype is a consumer product, its job is not to drive revenue, but to advertise the corporate solution: Lync. Lync gets microsoft 2bi/yr, while skype peak at 600m/yr in a good year. 600m sounds good, but not when you paid over 8bi for it.

And curiously, Microsoft is replacing "Lync" with "Skype for Business".... although I'm not sure if that is a simple renaming of the existing client.

aparently it is just a rename. i don't deal with any clients that use it anymore, but last i heard they are just adding lync support to skype, and decided to kill one of the brands. cleverly they killed lync.

They did say they would make the Lync client more like Skype. Which is insane, as Skype is one of the worst pieces of software I use on a day-to-day basis. Lync is a far cleaner, nicer, client.

Also, ffs, "Skype for Business".

Sadly, we mostly hear about those investor money driven companies.

They have money to hire staff to do PR. Bootstrapped companies are often cash strapped for a long time before they can afford PR people. Founders are told to do it, but reality of running a company gets in the way.