From an outside perspective, it sounds like Microsoft finally decided to merge various "Skype, but not efforts". There's the obvious in that Skype has had a bunch of different platform clients that were never quite all aligned and is now trying to merge everything into a single UWP client.
But it also sounds like Microsoft is also finally slowly starting to merge in the efforts from the business side (Yammer, Skype for Business aka Lync) and unify those communication efforts a bit more than just how Skype and Skype for Business share a brand but not much else. (All of this in an effort to present a more unified front versus Slack, HipChat, and others currently eating into the enterprise space and Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and others into the consumer space.)
From that perspective it's easy to imagine there have been quite a positions that have been redundant between the various teams.
It still can't sync message status across devices. Now and then I get re-ordered messages. Some messages repeatedly keep showing up as unread. It's quite bad at the messaging side.
The dumb UI I sorta excused as being, well, made by a small team not a big US retail company. The fact MSFT didn't overhaul it all is really annoying.
From my brief experience running Skype on multiple devices; if you can get both of them online at the same time for a while, it'll sync up eventually. If it's always one or the other, good luck (there's a reason I stopped running it on two devices)
I have my phone running right next to my laptop. It still doesn't handle things right (Signal does). If one is offline for a bit then sometimes it syncs, sometimes it leaves unread indicators.
I mean food and accommodation can be cheap but for the rest you pay "western" prices which makes it less appealing. You have to save for a new piece of technology longer and when going to places like UK stay in hostels and eat tinned food or again save longer...
But then you have the whole of Eastern Europe and south Europe to visit too, which is pretty awesome. Also, rent and food is probably your biggest budget. The beer is also awesome. And you get 5 weeks of vacation like everywhere in the EU.
Prague is a really cool city. A lot more cheaper and has better climate than London. I suspect rent is substantially cheaper as well. And they are on their own currency, not stinking euros.
Skype is the worst business tool that I use day to day and it continues to get buggier with each new release. I now have permanent ghost notification icons and I had delete Skype on my iPhone so my desktop app could receive calls reliably.
I was astounded when Skype showed up in KDE Telepathy in last months release. So yeah, backwards compatibility with the insecure backdoored hell that is Skype is great going forward.
Skype really went down the toilet when Microsoft bought them. At one point (~5 years ago) they were the best video chat and VOIP product by a long shot. Text chat and user search were clunky, but at least the notifications were reliable. It was a great tool for working with a remote team spanning multiple continents.
Now, the voice quality is still pretty good compared to a landline call, but the calls tend to drop, video quality has gone to crap, and the call/text notifications are broken. (I just got a notification on my phone about a text from yesterday, and it never showed up on my computer. WTF!??)
Search is still horrible. I can only assume that is is sequentially searching back through every line of chat with no index and hanging everything in the process.
Then when it does find something the common use case is never going to be scrolling back through 3 years of chat to get back to current messages, should just show say 100 lines of context and load more on demand.
I have no idea what they actually do on this product text chat wise, but it has always been average and isn't getting any better.
Skype on multiple devices has been in ruins for years. I'm not sure why, but being 'active' on two different products causes absolute meltdowns. Calls you can't answer, no sound or no video, the second device ringing endlessly after the first picks up, and anything else I can think of.
I feel it has gotten better recently, I've used Skype as a phone replacement ( with an actual skype number and in conjunction with google voice for sms) for a few years now, and currently run it on two laptops and two phones and haven't had issues for several months (I did have problems when I used it with android a while back, but have not since I no longer use it on that platform).
Interesting. I'll have to look into whether it's improved, or has Android specific bugs. Most of my multi-device experiences have included android, and that's reliably been the worst situation.
For reference my devices with skype installed are my personal phone with win 10, my development phone with ios, and win 10 / osx laptops. I also have a (5.1) android for development, but no skype on there.
I use the app version on win 10(anniversary) not the desktop. Don't know if that makes a difference but works fine for me. Even talking across the great firewall of china works fine surprisingly.
Even text messaging on multiple devices is a disaster. If I have Skype running on a PC and an iPhone, the phone app will almost never receive new messages.
Well maybe their jobs could be saved by dedicating them to reliable tone production over TCP/IP. Ever try to access a mailbox or navigate a customer support call center through Skype?
Audio compression optimized for psychoacoustics, I figure.
I doubt you'd be able to plug a dial-up modem into skype and achieve a working computer connection. Pure tones (as from key presses) is a less extreme case, but it's a conceivable problem.
If you do an outbound call (i.e. outside Skype, to something that would actually use DTMF) Skype doesn't use SILK/Opus on the outbound connection. You can tell because the quality is way worse.
There are also issues with the echo cancellation Skype uses. If you have issues with DTMF, that's the likely cause, not the audio codec.
I use Skype on Linux. Its a few versions behind, but to be honest last time I looked at it on Windows it was full of unnecessary flashy effects with no real purpose. I don't care about those as the Linux interface is fine for me. The call quality is crap whatever platform is being used.
Skype for Linux' UI is definitely better than the ad-ridden Windows counterpart. BUT it doesn't work. At work we have a lot of group chats, and some of them simply aren't shown in the Linux Desktop client.
And Skype for Web is utter crap (no non-latin search in contacts, WTF?), though it displays all messages.
It is pretty bad that a company with a global product doesn't include global support. In addition to the lack of support for non-latin characters in search, here's another one. I live in a country that uses the Buddhist era calendar. So the year is 2559 not 2016, a difference of 543 years. Skype sent me a notice that one of my contacts had a birthday and had turned 579 (she turned 36).
It doesn't sound like you're even remotely informed of what's going on in the Skype world lately. Basically, the old infrastructure was peer-to-peer, and over the last couple of months, Microsoft has been moving Skype over to a cloud version. That's why you'll notice the announcements that a lot of older clients and platforms would stop working, and brand new apps have been made for all of the current platforms... including a brand new Linux client.
If anything, this year is the biggest change Skype has EVER HAD.
No guarantees it won't still suck. (Though it's completely new, I think it's Electron-based or something.) Just saying, there IS a huge momentum at Microsoft to rework Skype from the ground up.
Not really. A supernode isn't really client/server architecture, even if it's hosted by Microsoft. Communication between users is still peer-to-peer. Supernodes are basically meant to help you find the client of who you're talking to. (Like the master server in many FPS games, it's just helping you find other players, one of the players or a dedicated server someone is running is actually hosting.) You could see this behavior recently even, in that if you sent a chat or a file, it could not go through unless both your client and their client were simultaneously online.
Now, all of your actual communications are being stored in Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. This means the actual content is centralized, and can be delivered when the other client is not present, which will help a lot with mobile. It also means it's more able to be reached by government data requests, of course.
> Linux support doesn't exist despite claims of embracing it.
huh :) i use skype on linux (archlinux) daily. and having seen my colleagues use it on windows, honestly, i find overall experience on linux infinitely better.
on windows there are tons of flashy things going on which serve to distract more than anything useful. if you happen to use non-corporate version, a huge chunk of chat area is filled with ads ^^)
If anyone wants to use Skype I just use the web client. It works with voice on Chromium now and thats good enough for me while I keep ranting about open protocols and how everyone should be using Vector now.
When the product began to display connection status at launch, it was a welcome update but it made me wonder why the recent decision to add this to the UI. If things are moving along smoothly, there doesn't tend to be a need to add gauges and indicators to your instrumentation. What is most likely are some backend issues after some migration or update was leading to a lot of inconsistent messaging problems. Adding connection status was a sanity check for troubleshooting these issues. It was one of those improvements that helped explain why things seemed to be a bit flaky recently.
There is a lot of competition in this space and I sort of feel that Skype was a Windows Phone play that didn't pan out for MS after the Windows Phone failed (along side the Nokia deal). Unfortunately for the London office, the product heads are not really sure how to right this ship. Hopefully everyone lands gracefully, whatever happens with the product.
Also an outsider, looking in, but I get the feeling it was more the opposite, Microsoft bought Skype for its brand first, users second, and left alone as a fiefdom to itself. I think Windows mobile efforts (phone) have actually been part of the kick (along with external pressure from Slack, HipChat, Facebook Messenger, Whatsapp, et al) to finally unify efforts, beyond just unifying brands.
The contrary perspective is appreciated. My outside take was the MS acquired Skype for the reasons you mention and in addition they also thought they had a VoiP solution that would be the killer app for Windows Phone. Then that ran into the obvious telecom incumbent push back that Apple and the iPhone seemed to navigate with such ease. MS arrogantly disregarded the telecoms positioning in this time period period since the telecoms were going to lose their voice revenue before having worked out mobile IP pricing and caps. The telecoms didn't want a voice service competition. So then Windows Phone was without its killer app and everything started to atrophy (Windows Phone/Skype/Nokia).
From what I saw, I felt like Microsoft bought Skype well before its modern Windows Phone plans quite started to take shape and that Microsoft didn't have much of an idea what to do with Skype other than Ebay was selling it and Microsoft preferred to own it than let it go to a competitor. (Thus far seems to be just about the only reason they recently bought LinkedIn, too. It was for sale and they didn't want it going to a competitor.) At the time of the Skype purchase it seemed that Microsoft was still trying to salvage what it could of MSN Messenger/Windows Live Messenger/Live Messenger/some other Brand of the Day which was leaking users like a sieve and meanwhile was fighting an internal fiefdom war with Lync, which was executing faster and smarter.
Basically, insert classic XKCD org chart diagram here of Microsoft being in a Mexican standoff with itself, especially at that time.
From that perspective, (and also one of being a Windows Phone 8 and now 10 owner), I don't think Skype was bought for Windows Phone and I don't think Skype is part of why Windows Phone is currently seeming rather atrophied. Instead, I think its Windows Phone where we've seen some of the hardest fought "battles" in the "One Microsoft" movement to de-escalate the old "mexican standoff" at Microsoft. (Which makes sense in a strange way: Microsoft couldn't afford as many "casualties" on the desktop or in the enterprise, so phone/mobile has been the proxy war.)
I think wanting a VoIP competitor to Apple's Facetime efforts was a part of the overall agenda for at least one of the messaging teams. But in terms of a lot of the shifts in branding choices and app approaches, I think a lot more of what we have seen in Windows Phone has been Microsoft's most externally visible battlefield where it has been trying to figure how best to merge all of its messaging and communications teams and destroy the old fiefdoms and silos (and guns pointed at each others heads). (All while marketing tries to fight from accidentally burning down a brand along with some of the bridges...) Windows Phone was just a useful catalyst (battlefield) to force that confrontation, without impacting the desktop too much.
That's essentially what this announcement seems to be about to me: the crashing down of another silo as Microsoft truly starts to consolidate its many communications apps.
Just a small correction: Microsoft bought Skype from Silver Lake / Andreessen Horowitz, not EBay. At the time Microsoft bought it, Skype seemed to prepare for an IPO, although I'm not sure how willing they were to go through with it.
Is one really needed? Facebook has VOIP, Slack has VOIP, most modern games have decent built in VOIP. It's not an interesting problem anymore and it's available everywhere.
Network effects. Skype is the only thing resembling a de facto standard for talking to any two random non-technical people. Skype has literally 100x the monthly active users of Slack, and barely anyone is on slack to make VOIP calls, especially with people outside of their team.
That's what WebRTC promises to solve, and there are already great tools using it (Appear.in for example).
What they don't solve is the discovery/network aspect.
My own side project/startup wannabee uses WebRTC to enable random non-technical people to talk to companies that use our product :) ( https://keveo.tv/en/ ).
Then it's good enough. Facebook is bigger than Skype and you can have a chat/VOIP call with anyone on Facebook, even if they're not your friend. Then there's Google hangouts as well. Slack is meant for teams. Gamers use Discord.
The weird part is that Skype, like it or not, has become worse every year. If you asked me 2 years ago I would never imagine it could loose users ever (like, whatsapp for example) now I see that I was wrong. Not only they did not improve or add functionality required by some users, loosing to competitors, but also their software has become buggier somehow.
Yea, the UI blows but one of the biggest concerns with Skype is that it is a leaky box. I know a lot of friends who have left skype because of government tapping. By tapping, I mean multiple governments all over the world seem to have unfettered access to every call and chat on the system.
When you are using the tool for business, that is a deal breaker.
Slack? Might not fully replace Skype as I don't think there is screen sharing. But for calls and chat, Slack does an outstanding job. Plus all the possible integrations with their API etc.
It's not integrated, but it's fantastic. Have used it extensively for code pairing sessions, undetectable latency on the screen and crystal clear audio.
it is somewhat integrated, namely you can do `/hero @handle` and it will work.
But SH doesn't work on linux, and it slows to a crawl when sharing with more than one person.
Still the best thing available if it works for your case.
If I'm not mistaken, it's a completely different product with the same name. It was lync for a long time, and they just basically changed the name but kept all the innards intact. I'm fairly sure it's on prem.
Yup, completely different products. Skype for Business is pretty much just a rebranding of Lync 2013 - for the longest time, the Skype for Business client was still calling itself Lync 2013 on it's about page. It's been pretty confusing, to be honest, since the two different Skypes are completely different products, talking different protocols that just barely communicate with each other.
Skype through Office 365 is also Skype for Business/Lync.
With the Lync => Skype for Business rebranding, some of the original MSN-emoticons that used to work in Lync / Office Communicator have been removed. :-(
Wire, maybe. I haven't used it much, but it's supposed to be end-to-end encrypted and supports audio/video/text. No phone requirement either. Still a centralized service, though, so they get access to metadata.
I've been enjoying it quite a bit. I've been successful in getting a good number of my friends over to it; mainly in part due to it's attractive UI and good media support. YouTube and Spotify links preview well in Wire, and there's good gif support. Video calls were excellent quality.
There's a distinction between trusting a company not to look at your data when you hand it to them in plaintext, (Skype) and trusting them to have completely flawless, bugfree code that the NSA hasn't backdoored. (Dual_EC_DRBG)
I'm not sure what parts you can verify, but I'm willing to trust the word of those at Whisper. Perhaps I'm naive but they seem to genuinely care about improving privacy for others.
This comment also shows that privacy is always based on trust. Trusting Cisco, Google, Microsoft, OpenSSL devs, Whisper Systems, whatever. You can decide who's more sympathetic, moxie, Zuckerberg, Nadella..
That was exactly the point I was trying to make when I responded to someone saying "well, with E2E encryption you don't have to trust them". Yes you do.
From my time in Cisco, they take security VERY seriously. There was the story about Cisco devices being intercepted by the NSA in-transit to high-profile targets[0]. This was really bad press, especially since a lot of people assume that Cisco was complacent in the practice (there was no evidence as such, this was very likely the NSA intercepting the package in-route to the target). Many hardware companies (Cisco included) are trying to do verified-boot approaches where they can detect if the firmware or hardware is not genuine, there-by defeating these package intercept cases.
If you are a high-profile target, no matter what vendor or software you use, Five Eyes will do whatever is needed to infiltrate your network. Cisco is a large target just due to their volumes compared to most other solutions (you are more likely to see news of Cisco attacked due to volume of sales). But with that, Cisco will also dedicate resources to trying to defeat this type of attack.
In principle, yes; in practice, most users are completely unable to assess whether the E2EE is effective in any way. How can you review the implementation does what the vendor says it does?
Say WhatsApp receives a request from some government saying they need the data. Period. WhatsApp complies by setting some flag on your account and now your client isn't doing proper E2E encryption anymore and it's all up to be intercepted. And when someone not on an intercept list goes to audit the network traffic, it all looks fine. Infinite possibilities here.
What makes people trust the advertised E2E encryption is really happening when they most need? Faith in these companies?
Peer review. And it's a moving target, skype used to be the recommended one back in the day, when it was decentralized. Right now openwhisper based systems are one of the better ones we have (so whatsapp and signal) that are sanely accessible with decent features.
And even if they did, how do we now when they make you use the open source version of protocol and when they switch to a government-mandated (or cracker-pwned) protocol version for selected customers?
And even there, to be absolutely sure, you'd have to have a well-sanitized environment (say, start from ensuring that when you build your application from sources, you know all the source code, and you know your compilers and libraries aren't pwned, and you know your hardware wasn't hacked by e.g. some BIOS-resident vulnerabilities.)
It's pretty depressing, actually. A determined adversary with intelligence-service level resources can get a lot done. Your main hope is to be such an insignificant target that they don't want to waste resources, e.g. expose 0-day vulnerabilities etc to get just you.
'When you are using the tool for business, that is a deal breaker.'
People say stuff like this all the time, implying that their business transactions are completely sacrosanct. At some point bog standard enterprise tech is going to be leaky someplace. I can't imagine the government would give a shot about my companies work. But then again I'm not the average paranoid HNer when it comes to this
Agreed, my logic is entirely the opposite. This would be a dealbreaker in my personal life, but why would I care what the gov't knows about my work life? Of course, I don't run the business...
The "government" like the "cloud" is just an abstraction.
The cloud is at the end someone else's computer. No, I'm sure Microsoft CEO isn't interested in sabotaging my business just like I'm sure the POTUS doesn't actively decide to kill innocent civilians. However, they make compromises (something we all do in engineering) and some of those compromises could end up with us as collateral damage.
What I'm getting at is even if all government agencies have purest of pure hearts, someone somewhere will eventually leave a door unlocked. Nobody can tell me with 100% certainty that this won't happen in the US and I trust their competence more than some outside contractor working for the Qatari emir.
This is my point of view on why we shouldn't have a dragnet. I don't have to argue that my government is evil. I don't even have to say my government is incompetent. But who in my government will testify for the other 200+ governments and their agents?
You don't know what the government cares about and what it doesn't. Over the last decade, many people used enterprise systems and hardware only to find out they weren't secure and the mundane information that traversed those systems were valuable to the government...and that they were compromised. [1]
You just don't know whose tapped the line, whose listening, and what systems your text is being indexed into. So reliable E2E is key.
If they want to listen to you they will listen to you, although you may make it more expensive for them to do so.
Unless you're using physical couriers and airgapped networks with TEMPEST protection. I say this unironically; these are facts people tend to brush away.
When consultants, partners, sales people, anyone really, send me a invitation to a Skype call, or a Google Hangout thingy, I always ask that they call me on my office phone. If that's not okay, then we'll just have to make due with email.
I'm not going to look for my headset, figure out how to use the right inputs and output, or sign up for a Google account because someone wants to call me. I have function telephone with a good wireless headset that just works.
I do the same, but international phone calls are still rather impractical compared to Hangout / Skype-like tool of choice. And this is coming from a Linux user who doesn't get supported by many such tools :) At least most tools have a way to dial into them from a standard phone.
I use it the most, but that is not comparable. I am just saying that, because I had X situations where somebody told me "Add me on skype", and then i say look, no.
Funny to see how comments about pretty much the same subject [1] are completely different depending on the company on the spotlight even when the number people getting laid off is way higher here.
Newsflash: big company does strategic business and decides to clean up redundancies...
I get that it's sad when your job no longer exists, but you can't really expect a business to pay for people it doesn't need anymore. I see a lot of outrage as people seem to think it's unethical to have your job lose it's right to existence, but it's just a fact of life if you're working for a larger business: you might be needed at some point, and at some other point, that might no longer be the case.
Sometimes I wonder about the invisible costs of a popular messaging system that often drops messages and/or notifications. How much miscommunication and missed connections has it caused?
It's really shameful to not have something reliable after we've had SMS for 2 decades with <1% failure rate and iMessage/Hangouts is generally okay. It really irks me in the worst way, being someone who has enough problems keeping in touch with people.
I wish Skype for business was a decent product but it's not. Strange UI quirks. Limits on the length of messages for no good reason. Emoticons which only appear once the message is sent - SQL statements are rendered to nonsense. All images are converted to thumbnails which need to be opened. Audio quality issues galore too. A lot of companies have moved to Skype for business for IM and VoIP. Not an enterprise level product.
Exactly it's like someone said let's turn Lync into Skype. Rather than building something useful they added the Skype name and kept the same dodgy implementation. Pat on the backs all round...
A lot of the dodgy stuff is because there are a lot of internals that haven't really been changed since it was Office Communicator 2007. I've spent far too much of my life dealing with these oddities, and I'll assure you, it is a trainwreck.
If you want to really have fun, write software that uses their terrible SDKs to plug into and extend Lync/Skype for Business.
Still, since it's bundled with Office and Office365 Exchange, lots of people are using it and dropping SameTime or XMPP or other options in large corporations.
The one thing I will give them is large file transfers. I hate having to deal with gmail telling me I need to upload it to drive, then warning me that it isn't shared with the recipient, etc, etc.
Settings > Tools > Options > IM > Show emoticons in messages
Of course, the people you're chatting with have to do it as well otherwise they'll still see them, but if you're sending SQL statements, log messages, and such, it makes sense to disable them.
In the UK is there a material difference from an employee perspective? In the US, if you are fired with cause, the company can fight you on paying out unemployment. If you are terminated without cause, it typically doesn't matter what the reason was behind it--you're still eligible for unemployment.
Yes. In the UK at least, there are 3 forms of payment someone might receive:
- Unemployment benefits, paid by the state if they don't get another job straight away;
- Their usual salary during the notice period, or pay in lieu of notice if they are sent home immediately (common in IT for security reasons);
- Redundancy pay.
The last one only needs to be paid in the case of dismissal "without cause". However, it's not called that. Redundancy refers to the fact that the job doesn't exist anymore. E.g., because the office closed down as is happening at Skype London. You can't just sack someone on a whim and say it is "without cause".
Where things get a bit more complicated in a case like Skype/Microsoft is that they have an obligation to offer their existing employees new jobs elsewhere in the company if possible. This isn't an especially strong obligation, but it does make things awkward if they keep, say, 50% of the staff, because there needs to be some reasoning as to why they kept that particular 50%, which needs to be seen as fair.
A few, but none with enough momentum to win over the mainstream. See Tox, Vector/Matrix, Jitsi with OTR... Otherwise there are web-based solutions that work well. Is it talky.io?
EDIT: Not forgetting Signal, of course. But I think you mean video comms?
I'm cautiously impressed by Matrix's momentum, to be honest (although I'm biased given I work on it) - we've got over 300K users on the matrix.org server now and around 1000 other servers visible from matrix.org. Meanwhile Riot.im (the app previously known as Vector.im) is hopefully pretty mainstream friendly...
I'm looking forward to Matrix too. It's still very immature right now through, as (as I understand it) we're still waiting for E2E encryption on mobile and group video calling(?).
It's hard to see Matrix as a standard right now too, with only one server and one client even remotely complete. Would love to see a multiplatform native client!
Thanks for the work you do, I realllllly hope matrix attains some success.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadWhat does that mean?
I think the proper term in this case is "laid off", since the company is eliminating those positions by closing that particular office.
But it also sounds like Microsoft is also finally slowly starting to merge in the efforts from the business side (Yammer, Skype for Business aka Lync) and unify those communication efforts a bit more than just how Skype and Skype for Business share a brand but not much else. (All of this in an effort to present a more unified front versus Slack, HipChat, and others currently eating into the enterprise space and Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and others into the consumer space.)
From that perspective it's easy to imagine there have been quite a positions that have been redundant between the various teams.
The dumb UI I sorta excused as being, well, made by a small team not a big US retail company. The fact MSFT didn't overhaul it all is really annoying.
Skype pays employees with title Software Development Engineer II:
And I suspect life is a lot more comfortable in Prague on $46k than London on $82k[0] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Skype-Prague-Salaries-EI_IE... [1] https://www.glassdoor.com/Salary/Skype-London-Salaries-EI_IE...
Prague is a modern city, and the Check Republic is in the EU and even in the schengen area, so travel around Europe is a non issue.
Yes, you won't be buying Teslas on that salary but most things not over $3k won't break the bank.
Headwinds indeed.
Now, the voice quality is still pretty good compared to a landline call, but the calls tend to drop, video quality has gone to crap, and the call/text notifications are broken. (I just got a notification on my phone about a text from yesterday, and it never showed up on my computer. WTF!??)
https://blogs.skype.com/2013/10/04/skype-architecture-update...
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...
Then when it does find something the common use case is never going to be scrolling back through 3 years of chat to get back to current messages, should just show say 100 lines of context and load more on demand.
I have no idea what they actually do on this product text chat wise, but it has always been average and isn't getting any better.
OS X Skype seems to work the best. Android version seems to be using a random number generator for displaying contact list availability status.
OS X Skype seems to work the best. Android version seems to be using a random number generator for displaying contact list availability status.
It's not that big of a deal, they are just trying to consolidate all of the good engineers into a cheaper office and letting go of the dead weight.
I doubt you'd be able to plug a dial-up modem into skype and achieve a working computer connection. Pure tones (as from key presses) is a less extreme case, but it's a conceivable problem.
There are also issues with the echo cancellation Skype uses. If you have issues with DTMF, that's the likely cause, not the audio codec.
This is an official sign that it would be strictly in maintenance mode.
And Skype for Web is utter crap (no non-latin search in contacts, WTF?), though it displays all messages.
If anything, this year is the biggest change Skype has EVER HAD.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-s...
Now, all of your actual communications are being stored in Microsoft's cloud infrastructure. This means the actual content is centralized, and can be delivered when the other client is not present, which will help a lot with mobile. It also means it's more able to be reached by government data requests, of course.
huh :) i use skype on linux (archlinux) daily. and having seen my colleagues use it on windows, honestly, i find overall experience on linux infinitely better.
on windows there are tons of flashy things going on which serve to distract more than anything useful. if you happen to use non-corporate version, a huge chunk of chat area is filled with ads ^^)
They've done nothing but make it worse since they bought it.
There is a lot of competition in this space and I sort of feel that Skype was a Windows Phone play that didn't pan out for MS after the Windows Phone failed (along side the Nokia deal). Unfortunately for the London office, the product heads are not really sure how to right this ship. Hopefully everyone lands gracefully, whatever happens with the product.
Basically, insert classic XKCD org chart diagram here of Microsoft being in a Mexican standoff with itself, especially at that time.
From that perspective, (and also one of being a Windows Phone 8 and now 10 owner), I don't think Skype was bought for Windows Phone and I don't think Skype is part of why Windows Phone is currently seeming rather atrophied. Instead, I think its Windows Phone where we've seen some of the hardest fought "battles" in the "One Microsoft" movement to de-escalate the old "mexican standoff" at Microsoft. (Which makes sense in a strange way: Microsoft couldn't afford as many "casualties" on the desktop or in the enterprise, so phone/mobile has been the proxy war.)
I think wanting a VoIP competitor to Apple's Facetime efforts was a part of the overall agenda for at least one of the messaging teams. But in terms of a lot of the shifts in branding choices and app approaches, I think a lot more of what we have seen in Windows Phone has been Microsoft's most externally visible battlefield where it has been trying to figure how best to merge all of its messaging and communications teams and destroy the old fiefdoms and silos (and guns pointed at each others heads). (All while marketing tries to fight from accidentally burning down a brand along with some of the bridges...) Windows Phone was just a useful catalyst (battlefield) to force that confrontation, without impacting the desktop too much.
That's essentially what this announcement seems to be about to me: the crashing down of another silo as Microsoft truly starts to consolidate its many communications apps.
What they don't solve is the discovery/network aspect.
My own side project/startup wannabee uses WebRTC to enable random non-technical people to talk to companies that use our product :) ( https://keveo.tv/en/ ).
When you are using the tool for business, that is a deal breaker.
Still the best thing available if it works for your case.
Also appear.in works on Linux.
Skype through Office 365 is also Skype for Business/Lync.
First time I saw it I couldn't help to notice the similarities. Even the emoticons were the same!
There was an integration you could get (purchase, I think?) which allowed Lync to connect to the MSN network and chat to users of MSN.
It provides end to end encryption with customer owned keys.
High level data on the security model: https://www.ciscospark.com/content/dam/ciscospark/eopi/count...
Draft of the KMS technology behind it: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-abiggs-saag-key-management...
There are many open source for teleconference these days, e.g. https://jitsi.org/ - I recall a few appearing on HN as well.
I mean, whatsapp claims it has E2E encryption, but I've never checked...
I'm not sure what parts you can verify, but I'm willing to trust the word of those at Whisper. Perhaps I'm naive but they seem to genuinely care about improving privacy for others.
If you are a high-profile target, no matter what vendor or software you use, Five Eyes will do whatever is needed to infiltrate your network. Cisco is a large target just due to their volumes compared to most other solutions (you are more likely to see news of Cisco attacked due to volume of sales). But with that, Cisco will also dedicate resources to trying to defeat this type of attack.
[0] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/photos-of-an-nsa-...
0. https://twitter.com/musalbas/status/777834235273027584
If you read the "Exploitation and Public Announcements" section of the Cisco publication, it meantions the source was another CVE from a month ago[1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12540692
[1] http://blogs.cisco.com/security/shadow-brokers
StarLeaf (https://www.starleaf.com/) is a great alternative for businesses.
What makes people trust the advertised E2E encryption is really happening when they most need? Faith in these companies?
It's pretty depressing, actually. A determined adversary with intelligence-service level resources can get a lot done. Your main hope is to be such an insignificant target that they don't want to waste resources, e.g. expose 0-day vulnerabilities etc to get just you.
The cloud is at the end someone else's computer. No, I'm sure Microsoft CEO isn't interested in sabotaging my business just like I'm sure the POTUS doesn't actively decide to kill innocent civilians. However, they make compromises (something we all do in engineering) and some of those compromises could end up with us as collateral damage.
What I'm getting at is even if all government agencies have purest of pure hearts, someone somewhere will eventually leave a door unlocked. Nobody can tell me with 100% certainty that this won't happen in the US and I trust their competence more than some outside contractor working for the Qatari emir.
This is my point of view on why we shouldn't have a dragnet. I don't have to argue that my government is evil. I don't even have to say my government is incompetent. But who in my government will testify for the other 200+ governments and their agents?
You just don't know whose tapped the line, whose listening, and what systems your text is being indexed into. So reliable E2E is key.
[1] https://theintercept.com/2014/12/13/belgacom-hack-gchq-insid...
Unless you're using physical couriers and airgapped networks with TEMPEST protection. I say this unironically; these are facts people tend to brush away.
I'm not going to look for my headset, figure out how to use the right inputs and output, or sign up for a Google account because someone wants to call me. I have function telephone with a good wireless headset that just works.
Strictly better than Skype in some ways, but privacy can't be taken to be one of them.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/micros...
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12538640
I get that it's sad when your job no longer exists, but you can't really expect a business to pay for people it doesn't need anymore. I see a lot of outrage as people seem to think it's unethical to have your job lose it's right to existence, but it's just a fact of life if you're working for a larger business: you might be needed at some point, and at some other point, that might no longer be the case.
It's really shameful to not have something reliable after we've had SMS for 2 decades with <1% failure rate and iMessage/Hangouts is generally okay. It really irks me in the worst way, being someone who has enough problems keeping in touch with people.
If you want to really have fun, write software that uses their terrible SDKs to plug into and extend Lync/Skype for Business.
Still, since it's bundled with Office and Office365 Exchange, lots of people are using it and dropping SameTime or XMPP or other options in large corporations.
I was going to say try to prefix with "!! ", but it doesn't seem to work anymore! It used to disable formatting and change to monospace font.
!! SQL statements, source code fragments, etc.
The list of gripes is too long...but let's just say With the lost of productivity I hope they are paying my company to use it.
Of course, the people you're chatting with have to do it as well otherwise they'll still see them, but if you're sending SQL statements, log messages, and such, it makes sense to disable them.
I believe this works around some relevant labour laws.
- Unemployment benefits, paid by the state if they don't get another job straight away;
- Their usual salary during the notice period, or pay in lieu of notice if they are sent home immediately (common in IT for security reasons);
- Redundancy pay.
The last one only needs to be paid in the case of dismissal "without cause". However, it's not called that. Redundancy refers to the fact that the job doesn't exist anymore. E.g., because the office closed down as is happening at Skype London. You can't just sack someone on a whim and say it is "without cause".
Where things get a bit more complicated in a case like Skype/Microsoft is that they have an obligation to offer their existing employees new jobs elsewhere in the company if possible. This isn't an especially strong obligation, but it does make things awkward if they keep, say, 50% of the staff, because there needs to be some reasoning as to why they kept that particular 50%, which needs to be seen as fair.
You can safely remove peer-to-peer from your requirements for an alternative.
If you are looking for an desktop app accessible to mainstream users, you can try viber.
EDIT: Not forgetting Signal, of course. But I think you mean video comms?
It's hard to see Matrix as a standard right now too, with only one server and one client even remotely complete. Would love to see a multiplatform native client!
Thanks for the work you do, I realllllly hope matrix attains some success.
I thought it was registered in Luxembourg and had a marketing office in London. Development was in Estonia...