Microsoft have driven Skype into the ground.
How they can release something this childish and terrible, yet also have the "Skype for Business" brand I don't understand.
If this had been released as "Skype for Fun" or "Skype for Kids" I'd almost understand. But trying to force users into this hideous mess is very frustrating, Skype was a dependable, if bloated app. Now I fear getting messages via it, it's so horrible.
Nothing will happen though. We're all upset, but Microsoft isn't going to roll back an upgrade/decision of this magnitude.
Both my employer (120,000 employees) and our main contractor (20,000 employees) use Skype for Business. By use, I mean we've purchased it and deployed it to every employee in the world.
It's never worked, ever, for anything. Not for audio, not for screen sharing, not for chat. I now decline all meeting requests that rely on Skype for Business for some essential part of the meeting.
Worked for company that was bought by MS. During the acquisition period, I was working for 3rd level enterprise support and were main contact for escalation of issues from our OS X users and MS. And yes, it never worked. Higher up guys where patting themselves on the backs for migrating to Lync and now it was So Well Executed while we in the actual client interface where left to deal with abysmal (platinum) support, private hotfixes, fixes what worked at one release and didn't on newer ones and all sorts of crazyness.
The "reason" that was said to be the issue was "our internal routing between the sites" and Yeah, pretty much every issue we had never manifested it worker was at home and used home connection or used cellphone client and gsm operator for data.
But yeah, fuck Lync. Worst gig ever. One reason why I think rebranding Lync to Skype for Business made sense: let's fool someone to buy it by letting them think they where getting same tech as real Skype, not just same shit with different name.
Except in my experience in an organisation forced to transition from Lync to Skype for Business, Lync always worked fairly well (although we only used chat and voice calls), and Skype for Business was wobbly and unreliable. Even though they were theoretically the same product, somewhere in the rebranding they managed to mess up the network behaviour too.
Skype used to be pretty solid, years ago. These days it's just dodgy as heck and moving Lync to be Skype-branded was one of the more baffling decisions I've seen from Microsoft marketing, because none of us thought Skype had any pedigree worth trying to exploit anymore.
We are a 40 person organisation and use S4B via our Office365 subscription. It works perfectly.
That said, being in Australia we don't have Microsoft-provided telephony in it, nor do we have any requirement for hunt groups and so forth. All our staff use their mobiles to talk, so Skype is purely used for teleconferences and video chats.
Enterprise telephony is a weird space right now - Microsoft ought to emerge the winner eventually with their broader stack proposition, especially when compared with most other vendors that try to stick in their bloatware or poorly written software. But gee it is a painful and slow transition to observe from the sidelines.
Serious question - what is so compelling about S4B.
Competition is very healthy in that space, last time I looked at Lync etc it was seriously lacking.
It's just the convenience that is compelling. If you already use Office365 the integration with outlook for web (and desktop for that matter, which I rarely use) is really neat and for the most part "just works".
I've got some seriously non technical people in the business who find it super easy to now arrange a conference call, when previously they would be using their iPhone on speakerphone to merge calls.
It seems to me that half of Microsoft is a rotten mess. Some parts know how to make good software for sure. The other half makes really bad decisions and keep rolling out patches that barely should've passed QA.
That's about right I think. Or in some cases, half of a product will be good (MSSQL engine), whereas the UI (SSMS) is a bug ridden mess (despite being head and shoulders above most other products).
I had a different experience. When we had a project with a team from another country we tried to use Skype. One person couldn't get it to work, so we tried a lot of other software just to have a video call and share the screen.
None of them worked flawlessly, some required to install some software to be able to run inside a browser? The audio on the others didn't work good. The others had bad video quality and massive lag/delay on the screensharing.
We switched back to Skype For Business/Skype (w/ personal account) and it was the best experience for us (except for that one guy :D), also very reliable!
Skype for Business is also quite nice, and doesn't have any bloat. Just call and message.
There was a discussion back here on HN, why nobody has written some good software just to call a client and share your screen. If you have millions of $, why is it so difficult to make a reliable app? I guess you can't get a lot of revenue on free calling software.
A lot of the time we just call the clients landline and use TeamViewer for screensharing. It's like we're still living in 2001...
Audio works well for us, for 1 to 1 conversations anyway. I haven't tried but apparently it's not so good at n to n. Screen sharing did work well until the latest update, now it hardly ever works and we have to use webex.
Chat is it's own mixed bag. Sometimes there is noticeable lag, you will get a popup showing you received the message but it will take several more seconds to show in the chat window. Very occasionally a message will take minutes to arrive or not at all. Copying and pasting is always a nightmare.
I wish ICQ would take their client from the late 90's and make a business version.
The connection issues seem to be company related. I’ve used it in companies where it always worked, and others where it would error out with a 50/50 chance with no discernable cause.
But Skype for Business (ahem, Lync) also has some fun, enterprisey restrictions that make no sense at all:
- You can’t send messages longer than a few sentences (stacktrace, code snippet are “too long”).
- You can’t send messages to offline contacts and have them receive it when they go back online. The message just disappears.
My employer (84,000 employees) uses Skype for Business. Audio, screen sharing and chat work reasonably well (with the occasional "Megan has to restart his client before joining" or "Jack cannot unmute himself for some reason"). However, any meeting with more than 40-50 participants leads to unacceptable general instability of the connection, so we need to use Adobe Connect for this. (The only reason why I still can't purge Flash from my work notebook.)
I actually have very good experience with SFB in my org. For meetings it's the best app I've used. But for persistent group chat it seems to be worthless. We're trying out stuff like Rocketchat and mattermost instead.
skype for business is by far the worst piece of software I've used in the past 5 years
things randomly don't work (e.g. video in groups, picture whiteboards in groups), there's an inability to turn off highlights in group messages, and my machine locks up when a voice call comes in (because the skype client is using 4gb of RAM and windows has swapped it out)
only the MS group chat software comes close to being that awful, that feels like an intern's first C# app
The worst part about "Skype for business" is that it replaced Lync, which was much better IMO. It was simple but effective, and I don't remember having any kind of problem with it
Except it now looks and works crap now. I'm still on the old Lync client at my office even though many people have "upgraded" to skype for business. At some point my hand will be forced and I will be annoyed.
I can't recall any software company who rolled back an upgrade. UI upgrades take a lot of resources and overhaul, they're also UX-tested, involve marketing ops, etc: If they haven't got the message before, companies prefer to risk dying than cancelling their attempt to pivot.
Look at Ubuntu's Unity. Apple's emoji bar. Microsoft's Windows 8.1 tiles.
Ubuntu is moving back to the Gnome shell, I think. So sometimes companies do get the message. (Although I personally like Unity, so the change is going to be a bit annoying.)
But not because people want them to go back.
They are going back because Ubuntu is investing less and less into desktop and consumer products and more into enterprises.
I consider Windows 10 to represent a significant step back from the Windows 8 UI ideas on Microsoft's part. Windows 10 makes a genuine effort to come to a system which can adapt for touch and non-touch UIs, rather than just using the former all the time.
If this had been released as "Skype for Fun" or "Skype for Kids" I'd almost understand. But trying to force users into this hideous mess is very frustrating, Skype was a dependable, if bloated app. Now I fear getting messages via it, it's so horrible.
Nothing will happen though. We're all upset, but Microsoft isn't going to roll back an upgrade/decision of this magnitude.