Story of the times, have a good thing then break it so you can replace it with a shitier thing. Then have the competition eat your lunch by making a slightly less shitty thing.
I found my physical “skipe” phone last week, dang it we could have had a bad bitch. But no, now we have fucking teams.
Immigration Canada wanted proof of my wife and I’s relationship, so we dumped a packet of printed call logs on them as thick as a novel. Skype certainly served its purpose.
Not really. It’s just called “Teams” now.
I want to put Skype’s corpse on a banner and wave it around to all the software that’s currently undergoing enshittification.
Truthfully I loved Skype until Microsoft bought it.
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skype was way ahead of his time. The quality was top notch. MS fucked by changing the architecture from decentralized to centralized in windows servers - this fucked up the calls quality and it created an opportunity window for whatsapp, viber, etc…
MS turned skype to shit.
I’ll never get over MSN Messenger
For video calls that was really bad compared to skype.
Unfortunately everybody was using it (i had to do it because everybody was using it).
Welk Yeah, it wasn’t for video calls, it was for messages full of emoticons :)
And the nudge!
Story of the Microsoft…
Everyone cashed out on Skype the day it was sold to eBay. Years later people are still wondering what happened to it?? The train left the station forever ago.
Yup. It was THE app to use way back in the day. Before that was Ventrilo, but setting up a Vent server was a pain in the ass. I got it working once, but it was a lot of port tinkering and giving out my IP to trusted friends.
Skype made it so easy to just click and call or else make rooms for your guild in whatever game you played at the time (my poison of choice was Ragnarok Online).
Then Skype changed hands, started monetizing, pushing Windows pre-installs, and would even watch conversations to make sure no one was using the app for sexual purposes.
giving out my IP to trusted friends
Just in case you ever get back into it: We regularly see scanners scanning the internet with a million packets per second at work these days. That means it takes them 4000 seconds to scan the entire IPv4 Internet to check who responds on port 3784. So handing out the IP selectively won’t be enough.
I also learned that the hard way privately with my Minecraft server. It was found in a scan and listed on Shodan at some point, and I hadn’t put up a whitelist. Some shitty kids came and destroyed whatever they could find before finally putting up signs to mock me lol
Wow, nothing is sacred anymore. Luckily the only people I ever play with these days are my nephew, his girlfriend and my girlfriend.
We’re all local so we just play modded java on LAN and I host the server straight from PC. His girlfriend’s family lives downstairs from us so they can jump on even if we’re not home.
I do have a friend a couple hundred miles away who wants to play, so I might have to look into just getting a secured Bisect server running instead of hosting.
I remember the “old” Skype, which was essential for keeping in touch with my siblings before we got cell phones. Once I got a phone, it was the end of Skype until ~2014 when I got a job where Skype for business was available. I still didn’t use it because that application would sometimes crash if you just jiggled the mouse. It became a running joke at my workplace.
Clock into work, Skype crashed.
Go to lunch, Skype crashed.
Ran out of TP at home. You guessed it. Skype crashed.
Still find it absolutely wild that Microsoft fucked up during the global pandemic and allowed Zoom to slide right into the communications spot Skype should have been.
Fucking idiots.
Hey, RIM/Blackberry’s CEO went to mobile world Congress in 2010, 3 solid YEARS after the iPhone launched, was dominating and defining the smartphone world and said, “we feel touchscreen is not the future of mobile phones” and rolled out another hybrid touch/keyboard model like the 5 they already had
Blackberry was $150/share as of 2009 with the entire world in front of it. It’s now worth $3.59/share.
Intel thought the iPhone market was going to be too small so they didn’t agree to manufacture their CPUs
While also completely missing the boat on the potential of graphics cards and watching Nvidia and even AMD become massively more relevant in recent years.
Netflix tried to get distribution in Blockbuster and a partnership w/them and were told to fuck off …
Blackberry and Nokia were so slow to react to the iPhone, it was painful to watch.
And then, to bring us full circle to OP, Microsoft made it’s strategic acquisition of Nokia long after they had squandered enviable market share to Apple and Google 😂 https://www.theverge.com/2016/5/25/11766540/microsoft-nokia-acquisition-costs
Their stuff was better, but disadvantaged by public perception. A perfect storm one can say.
Their stuff was significantly worse in user experience. Buttery smooth scrolling and highly reactive multi touch on a touch screen only device was revolutionary. Touch screens back then were known to be shitty to use. The competition to the iPhone were phones with tons of buttons, styluses and cumbersome user interfaces.
All previous players in the smartphone market Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, Windows mobile were slow to adapt and failed.
Palm’s webOS was competitive to iOS and in many ways superior. It failed because of mediocre hardware, bad carrier deals, and running out of money too quickly.
Google‘s Android succeeded despite sucking until about version 4 by willpower and deep pockets from Google.
The original introduction keynote for the iPhone was mindblowing back then.
with tons of buttons, styluses and cumbersome user interfaces.
My dad had one. I liked that more. What you call cumbersome I call clean and sharp.
While those rows of vaguely symbolic mildly nauseating icons we have now irritate, overload and suppress me.
And back then I didn’t know that, but making Tcl/Tk programs for Windows Mobile of that time, for example, was as easy as for desktops.
All previous players in the smartphone market Blackberry, Nokia, Palm, Windows mobile were slow to adapt and failed.
Yes, that’s why Stephen Elop went from Microsoft to Nokia, buried Nokia’s relevant smartphone business, then went right back to Microsoft. Blackberry was too business-oriented, they should have marketed more universally.
And they even dropped Maemo. Maemo didn’t have any of Symbian’s supposed “burning” traits. Nobody can persuade me a Linux+Qt based system is worse than iOS, especially of that time.
Dunno about Palm then.
Windows Mobile was Microsoft’s accidental good product, of course they decided to bury that as soon as they found an excuse.
Let’s clarify this - I don’t consider iPhone anything good. Its success is a result of a cultist phenomenon which didn’t lead to anything good either. I agree about Android.
But I can also see how that phenomenon happened, I myself looked in awe at anything Apple, just where I live it was and is considered luxury stuff. I also had this indoctrination from stupid books and articles about Stephen Jobs being some genius and Apple being a good company and the underdog. Had a children’s book about computers with the semi-transparent colored plastic iMac and classic MacOS screenshots, and had seen an ad about the lamp-shaped iMac G5, liked that aesthetic, wanted that. Used QuickTime browser plugin under Windows 2000, and my dad had an iPod. By the time I’ve seen a Mac IRL Apple’s aesthetic mutated into some ugly crap I didn’t like. I still feel that awe in what others do with software like Hotline and KDX and other things that originated on Macs. Apple had a huge emotional capital. Unfortunately, it went the way it went.
Using TCL/Tk and Qt based apps on smartphones with a stylus was a pain in the butt in my experience.
You probably mean Windows Phone, not mobile. Yes, Windows Phone 7 and 8 on Nokia phone were really compelling.
Being able to scroll and zoom real websites smoothly on a phone, instead of having to use crappy WAP was huge.
This meant lots of people were getting an iPhone as their first smartphone.
The iPhone succeeded initially because of ease of use. Of course Apple‘s brand image played a role as well. When it came out it was 1000 US$, making it more expensive than other phones. So it instantly became a status symbol.
Ease of use and status meant the executives of corporations started to demand their IT departments make the iPhone work with their Microsoft based networks and such.
Later on Apple started supporting corporate features and mobile device management for corporations really well. Corporate IT loves iPhones because of the great management options, the limited range of models, and long support with software updates. Once Apple had a foot in corporate, their success became cemented.
You probably mean Windows Phone, not mobile. Yes, Windows Phone 7 and 8 on Nokia phone were really compelling.
No, I mean Windows Mobile. Windows Phone with those tiles - no.
Once Apple had a foot in corporate, their success became cemented.
Dunno, it felt like the cult part fired much earlier and for much longer.
to be fair i miss physical keyboards on phones. i wish we still had space for it.
I’d happily have a phone half an inch thicker if it meant a folding or sliding physical keyboard for my large hands.
You could get a Bluetooth keyboard. Literally pick your size.
Same. Colossal pain in the ass.
Get yourself a RIMjob and help bring them back
Did they really? Microsoft championed Teams and its pretty accepted in corporate environments today, especially if they are already on Microsoft.
Afaik, Skype for Business was merged into Teams. Skype for non-business consumers has been virtually dead for longer. The way I see it, Microsoft let go of the brand, the value of which is questionable in this decade. When they bought it, I remember the rumors saying it was because of its voice codec, which probably got used in everything from xbox live to teams in the end.Nobody uses Teams voluntarily. It’s always imposed by corporate.
Skype was the term for skyping. It’s like buying a social media that coined the term tweet and changing it’s name to a letter. Stupidest shit ever.
I couldn’t get my head round this at all. Everyone used Skype where I worked, and it seemed hugely popular. By the time COVID happened, I was in another job, and all of a sudden everyone was going mad about this Zoom program. I’d never heard of it, but it just came out of nowhere and everyone on the planet was using it. How on earth Skype fumbled it so hard is absolutely staggering.
Skype didn’t fumble it, Microsoft just doesn’t know how to strategy. When they bought Skype, they killed MSN and told people to move to Skype, whereas they should’ve integrated the two to make the transition seamless. Then they had both Teams and Skype for Business at the same time by the time COVID happened.
They messed up on every turn.
IMHO, the pandemic just allowed everyone to see how much better of an experience Zoom had over Skype.
I worked in an office where half of corporate used Skype, and the cooler sub-brands used Zoom. No one in the main corporate office was happy about using Skype. Microsoft had been neglecting it for quite some time.
Microsoft has 1 massive disadvantage when it tries to enter new markets.
It has to deal with brutal cutthroat competition from its worst enemy: Microsoft.
Ms internal politics destroy almost all its successes, their politics are why theyve never really been a threat, for every skype there’s a teams which cuts them off at the knees lest it cost a division head their chance at a promotion.
I personally blame stack ranking, invented by Jack Welch to justify cutting 20% of the company.
If you want to get mad, the Behind the Bastards episode on him explains why corporate America is what it is today.
MSN messenger died for Skype
Skype died for Teams
We’re not on a great trajectory here
(Yes Lync too, but everyone was pleased about that)
Teams died for Teams (New)
And MSN was so much better.
What most people don’t know about the ouroboros is that every time the creature eats itself it becomes a little bit closer to being a turd (a consequence of its peculiar metabolism) so even though from an inside perspective the system appears to be in a complex mysterious cyclic kind of stasis, from the outside it is just more and more obviously a turd in the shape of a donut.
Is this real lore or is this meme
I am not sure I remember anymore, I have eaten my tail one too many times.
I don’t think this is a direct meaning of the metaphor, though any metaphor of endlessly repeating cycles can be placed in a rhetorical framework where it represents enshittification so I am sure I am not the first person to add or tweak the metaphor with that context.
Teams dying doesn’t sound too bad either. Just hoping the next iteration isn’t even worse
Next iteration will be “Copilot for Teams”.
Whenever you get a message, Copilot will auto-send an answer unless you click “no” in a popup without window decorations, showing a timer.
On Windows Pro, you can disable this with a registry key, but that resets with feature updates.
Is there a non paywalled link?
They screwed it up as much as possible and abandoned the P2P protocol and are now shutting it down. The behavior is like a little kid who broke a toy, it stopped working and he throws it away.
Can I guess that the American amoral capitalist company won’t have transferred my Skype credit?
I had like $9.22 remaining credit from some international calls back in 2002 I was going to use…eventually.
great, now do teams.
nobody should have to use that ugly useless piece of shit for anything.
My company decided we don’t need phones and makes us use Teams for calls. Every day I think about murdering the person who made that decision.
Same here. I made my bed with it though.
I have a “work phone”. it sits at my desk. I’ll answer it when I’m there, otherwise I don’t get called.
I can’t (pronounced won’t) install any work shit on my personal phone because I run e/os and it isn’t compatible with their policies. 🤷 oopsies.
fuck em. I’ve been giving them 4 hours a day for months now, after giving them over a decade of 15-18 hour days.
