LinkedIn? The network everyone loved to hate? I don't think anything has changed in that regard, if anything, Microsoft are probably 1% more trustworthy compared to the super-shady LinkedIn management of old.
Microsoft is opening LinkedIn up to other tools while completely maintaining their goal of not sharing your data (Iframe integrations so no data is shared). They're expanding capability without selling out users
Did i miss some news? Skype is still Skype and Linkedin hasn’t changed much either. ?? if anything those two proves being Acquired by MS is not as bad as for example Google who loves to eventually shut down their acquirers.
Skype UI was changed dramatically for virtually no obvious reason and resulted in the usage of skype to be way more annoying for basically no good reason. They then rebranded Lync to be called Skype for Business which is a giant mess because like so many microsoft enterprise products it uses some strange scheme to connect to either a web-based server or to an enterprise server that invariably is not setup correctly and never works reliably. So they basically bought skype which everybody loved and turned it into something that a huge amount of people don't like now due to UI changes and created a second version of Skype that basically barely works and many people are forced to use at work..
In addition to everything you said, and I would also add:
- Microsoft turned Skype into spyware. Before Microsoft, Skype used encrypted peer-to-peer connections which I'm confident had excellent cryptography given how much it annoyed some governments that Skype couldn't be bugged or monitored.
- Microsoft provides no way to delete chats, voicemails, and video messages, although they give the ridiculous option of "hiding" old conversations as if that's a reasonable substitute for deletion. At this point, it wouldn't be greatly surprising if they record and save all voice calls.
There's inertia in people and companies abandoning Skype because everybody knows it and everyone has it (or had it). But the thing that really preserves Skype is that it can connect from any device to device, including landlines, and it can do all of audio, video, and text.
A Skype-killer product needs (a) to run on all major platforms so you can communicate with someone regardless of whether they are on Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, or iOS, and (b) the ability to make connections to landline phones, (c) do all of audio, video, and text chat, (d) be reliable and trustworthy. That would be the Skype killer.
We are forced to use Skype for Business at my job, and let me tell you, I have never seen a POS like that. Calls drop out for no reason, UI is unintuitive with all kinds of weird dropdowns and buttons, slow to start and just a pain to use in general. I wish we could use Slack calls instead...
I'm counting down the days until Teams has fully integrated all of the Skype for Business features so that they can finally shut the POS down. It is, indeed, the absolute worst.
I use it in my job as well. I agree it is pretty terrible but it is miles better than Microsoft Communicator which is what we used pre Skype for Business.
