As much as I love to hate on Skype’s godawful and seemingly inexorable UX decline since the Microsoft acquisition, I have to give them credit for this latest rollback. It takes balls to admit that you were wrong on such a major redesign.
No idea what they were smoking when they decided that their target customer was Snapchat users. Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail. This alone has made it my go-to for mission critical video chats. All I could do was cringe in embarrassment when trying to schedule business meetings and seeing those squiggles pop up all over the place.
Skype UX doesn’t need to be “fun”. It just needs to be usable. Kudos to the powers that be for making a tough call to benefit their core userbase.
Companies are deathly afraid of introducing new brands and cling to the misguided idea of expanding their existing brand into unrelated territories. Usually this results in the brand losing all meaning.
So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory (social media). The technical aspect or what users actually want is a afterthought.
Microsoft could release their own alternative to current social media apps but they won't just start small and build a new brand.
Brands are typically associated with external reputations, but nobody has more exposure to a brand than the employees of the company that owns it. As a result the brand has greater power inside the company than anywhere else - however much a person will say "I'll use this because the name Skype makes me feel good," so much more will Microsoft people say, "I will approve of this because the Skype name makes me feel good."
I made a comment about this in a similar vain: Mozilla wants to overload the Firefox name to the point where it's totally meaningless. The success of the Firefox name is no doubt the reason but this fails to recognize that's not how names work. This direction is exactly the reason why Nintendo called their console "WiiU" and that turned out about as well as this ultimately will.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Firefox being the name of a single product. The entire underlying premise of this redesign is flawed.
Just for nitpicking, the Wikipedia article says Wii U too (although I know that was a failure, I was just looking for this because it seemed interesting)
They've also deemphasized Skype usernames, which is unfortunate in my most common use case: connecting with someone who requests we use Skype for a one-off international business call.
I find I can type, say, jsmith123 into the search box and I'll somehow either get multiple users listed as having that username or a bunch of similarly named accounts, possibly ranked higher than the one I explicitly typed in.
We ran into this as well as our business used Skype for all internal communication for a time, and it was also used for remote interviews, because in the past most people has a Skype username. Now most don't, and Skype pushes that you sign up with your phone number, which is very hard to find, especially if you're linking to someone not from your country. There is no indicator if they used their local number, their number with the country code, their number with some combination of this, and so on. Likewise, it's not as simple as look for their number and add, you need to add them as a contact first then you can message them.
It's really unintuitive and contrary to how people use Skype. It's using the method whatsapp, telegram, et.al use, but they don't really have a discoverability feature. You know someone, or you don't until you know someone who does.
Skype should either have just ditched the username search or embraced it. They tried to make it both, but they really didn't pull it off well, and now there is an entire subset of the userbase you cannot find with their find feature.
It started way before that was even a thing, definitely remember when they switched from old school Contact list window + chat window to an all in one design on OS X my machine would rev up the fans when I video called on the latter.
Have you tried out Zoom? Hands down best video chat / streaming service I've ever used, we used at at work for our fully remote team communication with no issue. High quality and barely ever any lag
I'm very hesitant about zoom. I use it for conference calling at my job and download the app when I had to listen in to a meeting I was off site for. The meeting ended I exited the call and thought nothing of it, then an hour or two later I got an access notification that zoom had opened my camera, while I was under the impression it had quit. Their technique of downloading an executable every time you open a meeting from the web is also strange and somewhat uncomfortable. I do agree that it works brilliantly but I have my concerns about privacy and safety regarding it.
Apple users stuck to facetime which probably broke up whatever contacts that people had through skype. As an android user I just slowly stopped using skype in favour of discord, except when required for job interviews.
That's for US searches, and it always seemed that Skype was more popular in Europe, but the graph is very similar if you change it to worldwide searches.
> Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail.
Wait what? I have, at least for personal communications, the exact opposite experience. Skype video often cuts out and pauses, or even entirely drops the connection, at which point me and my friend(s) either switch over to FaceTime (if they have iDevices as well, since its by far the most reliable in my experience) or WhatsApp video (decently reliable and pretty much everyone has it).
> Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc.
I think it's important to include at least one free video chat app when doing a comparison. Have you tried Jitsi Meet[0]?
A few weeks ago I got a new laptop and downloaded a new version of Skype. It forced me to use a Microsoft account and I could not use my existing Skype name, which had all my contacts. There was no apparent way to move my contacts. I don't care that much about UI changes, but preventing me from using the account that I have been using for 10+ years is ridiculous.
I installed Windows 10 on my machine a couple of weeks ago, and downloaded the latest version of Skype. I could still log in with my 10 year old account, but I couldn't recover my chat history (even though I have the actual appdata dir that contains the chat data)
On the general Microsoft account issue, my Skype account I had for 10+ years also became inaccessable after a random criminal linked their Microsoft account to my Skype account to make fraudulent transactions. After trying to get my skype account back using the account recovery form, I realized that even though I should have had enough answers to successfully recover the account that it was failing probably because all the answers were now being checked against the criminal’s Microsoft account instead of my Skype account.
No amount of customer support chatting or Microsoft supoort calling could get that account back, or even get someone to investigate the fraud. I suppose that Skype makes money off these transactions so why bother to stop it.
Skype accounts are Microsoft accounts. That's why the sign in page says "email, phone, or skype." But Microsoft did a spam purge as well, that's why Skype is usable again. If your Skype account was compromised and being used to send spam, it's probably gone for good.
Once old Skype account is connected with Microsoft Account it can't be separated; if I'm not mistaken it was possible to disconnect both shortly before MSN/WL Messenger was terminated completely.
I did log into Skype recently on my old forgotten accounts - one I was using on daily basis and other I tried to delete because of unfortunate username (no response of course happened from Skype back then; leaving account to rotten for period of over 365 days didn't do a thing). Both were working without problems (tho, chat history was gone as they announced), not connected with any Microsoft Accounts.
And honestly, MSN Messenger was the best service MS provided - sans that short time when it was the annoying Windows Messenger bundled with XP
I got the prompt to "convert" my legacy Skype account to a Live account a few years back. Guess what? I ended up with 2 accounts. After a while of nobody being able to find me (constantly adding the old account, which didn't work anymore, because it was the only one that showed up in the search) I got in touch with Microsoft support. Once I proved my identity they agreed to delete the old account.
...Except that was around 2 years ago and it still exists - and it's still the only one that comes up when you search Skype for my name.
The company had argued at the time that the rise of stories across social media meant it was something that all social apps would adopt. And because it was the way people were used to interacting now, Skype needed to include the feature in its own app, too.
When has this type of thinking ever been a good idea?
The blow back on this change was so bad the ratings in the iOS App Store tanked to 1 Star. It crept back up over time.
Early testing indicated people were not happy. The people involved made their impact, got their promos and moved on.
When Skype was acquired by Microsoft, it was flooded with PMs (primarily) and devs rolled in. I think LinkedIn has done a better job shielding itself from such.
I’m glad to see the rollback, but from talking to friends and family, a lot of damage has been done - mainly around rolling out new design above all else despite degradation in features and quality.
Some teams are structured in a way that there's rarely any time or resources to do user research/testing. I wouldn't necessarily point my finger at the PM's.
Hopefully they will work to improve "Skype for Business" to work more like Skype.
Skype for Business is just horrible.
1) Messages appear grouped by who I send them to, but there are multiple message threads. This wouldn't be the end of the world, except if I respond on my phone or laptop the responses go to different message threads. Impossible to read back a message thread and have it make any sense.
2) Most of the time, there's a sync issue... I get messages on all devices, but if I reply I only see my responses on the device that I was on when I typed the response. Mix with point 1, and I have no meaningful history being logged.
3) Messages take different amounts of time to get to a phone or a computer.
4) Files will silently fail to send. I look at a conversation, and it looks like my file goes through... then I look back a day or so later and it says, "File failed to send." So aggravating. Can't rely on it at all.
Anyway I know it's probably more to do with the instance my work set up, but this is my first time using Skype for Business since it rebranded away from Lync. And the experience hasn't been good. Give me Slack or Discord or WhatsApp... really anything else. No shortage of options these days.
The 4th point is the file sharing was disabled by the administrator. There really should be a clear message on that rather than error the file transfer.
For the rest, I don't think that skype can work at all when opened on multiple devices. It should be easy enough to uninstall from your phone.
It's just Exchange models extended beyond the breaking point to try and support real-time chat, and it really, really shows. Any time we enter a client that still uses 'Skype for Business', you know you're in for a rough time.
Skype is terrible. The call quality sucks, it's overpriced, video calling sucks, screen sharing sucks, and recently text messaging stop working almost completely. So what did they do? They moved the ability to text to some arcane sub-menu, it's still there, albeit non-functional.
That was the last straw for me before my account got the axe.
Gnome3 made technical decision to use JavaScript, but users revolted and forked Gnome2 written in C (now: Mate). Gnome is free software, while Skype is proprietary. Skype users have no right to revolt.
Discord has apps for Windows/Android/iOS/Linux, as well as a surprisingly good web interface. I've switched over completely from Skype and been consistently impressed.
For VOIP I've just been using TeamSpeak3. I'd prefer mumble, but TS3 is more user friendly and running a server on a cheap VPS is simple. No callouts/phone numbers though, pure VOIP, and probably hard to get a customer to join a TS3 server if you try using it professionally.
But imo gaming VOIP is miles ahead of everything else, because gaming has relied on it for a long time.
None of the non-gaming VOIP solutions (I know of) even have voice activation, which drives me crazy.
For text, my friend circle has shifted to just using whatsapp web, again, I'd prefer Signal,or Matrix (or even IRC), but there's the network effect shrugs.
I can live with TS3 and whatsapp over Microsoft Skype any day of the year.
Hey, I looked into your HN profile but there is no contact info. I'd like to get in touch with you. I am working on a side project, to offer VoIP (Matrix, XMPP, SIP) and social media hosting services. When pitching the idea to people, network effects are indeed cited as the issue to solve. I am trying to provide an answer by selling package plans, basically as a means for enabling the privacy-aware people to help bring their contacts/friends/family along.
Anyway, it would be great to get in touch with you, I'd like to send you an invite link and see if you could validate some of the ideas. :)
Check out Dialpad (https://dialpad.com) - it has native apps for all the platforms that you listed, and no attachment to social networks. You will also receive a phone number.
So far, it’s clear from the replies there isn’t really an alternative with a similar feature set. I guess this is why Skype persists (anyone what to start up an alternative? :)).
Unknown. The reset was done by a family member so I can't be sure. They are pretty tech savvy and work in IT but who knows. If it was a phishing page it was presumably (hopefully?) a reasonably convincing one.
The password reset happened two days into a seven day vacation. The account takeover happened while we were flying home. That the attacker waited until we were likely to be completely offline for several hours makes me suspicious that either hotel staff or staff at the hotel's Internet provider were involved. We have contacted the hotel but they seem uninterested.
That's clever! I wonder if they would go to all that effort just for a Skype balance. Maybe tried to use the Skype as a staging point for attacking other things?
Similar story here. My account wasn't stolen but merely used by a bot to send out spam to my business contacts. Afterwards the account was locked for good... What?
Barely. It has never worked even remotely good enough to use in a professional setting whenever I tried using it. Skype is way better in terms of call quality and stability.
I adore Discord's seamless voice chatting abilities, as well as its chat functionality. Unfortunately since they have initially decided to focus on strictly cloud-based deployments with no option for local deployments, it's a not a viable alternative where strict control is needed over deployments.
We've tried several different video conferencing programs within my company to bring in people from two offices about 150mi apart in Cali, as well as a couple of employees working in the mid-west. Nothing has worked as well as Skype but even Skype still seems to have issues with reliability at times, necessitating a reconnect to the call.
When we tried Discord for a while the reliability was ok but some folks had struggled with the user interface.
Eventually IT rolled out Office365 but Teams was so unreliable for most people in my group that we stopped using it for our daily stand-up meetings and switched back to Skype.
Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference)
Zoom used to be rock solid, but is also suffering software rot these days. We've been having huge problems with recent updates only being able to talk to some meeting IDs.
(I have used both Zoom and Hangouts. These views are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.)
Zoom,
1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.)
2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)
It's not quite what I'm talking about. That link is unique to your user, kind of weirdly, and is some sort of personal meeting room.
I'd like to assign names to meetings, not to me; every meeting that I happen to schedule the meeting for shouldn't all have the same name; the name should be descriptive of the meeting itself. That is, a meeting about widget production shouldn't be "suzieqmeet" just b/c Suzie Q. scheduled it; it should be called something like "widget-production". A later meeting about spline reticulation could just be "spline-reticulation"; the URL "meet.vc-company.com/spline-reticulation" is obvious, and trivial to transfer over speech to a coworker.
The great thing about Hangout, IIRC, is that it sort of automatically slugifies the meeting subject, so the defaults are pretty close to "magically just works". Trying to convince my entire coworker base to adopt "vanity URLs" is not going to happen, and doesn't really solve the problem.
> Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference)
Yes. Today, there are N somewhat crappy corporate video conferencing solutions. It's feasible to convince a VC to fund a new one, because they do a lot of video conferencing, and really understand the pain points.
Thus, tomorrow there are going to be N+1 somewhat crappy video conferencing solutions. It just seems like one of those "simple on the surface" issues, that turn out to be a massive can of worms.
Would be nice if they could consolidate Skype, Skype Desktop and Skype for Business (comes with office) that were all installed on my Fathers PC for some reason.
From trying to hold remote meetings in Skype, I've learned that the number of versions of Skype that a colleague has installed is inversely proportional to the their technical ability. Usually it's easier to get someone to install Skype on their smartphone and call in that way than to sort out the confusion on their computer.
Now if only they would make Skype For Business comprehensible...I have tried many times to join (not host) a call run by someone at MS or one of their partners, and the links just end up taking me in circles. The host always said it happens regularly, and we just end up talking on the phone.
The article is full of screenshots with skype in full screen mode. But is anyone using skype that way? I want it on the side, not taking real estate space when nothing is happening. Instead they created a big block where you cannot hide the conversation even when there is none. I guess Microsoft must think that their users want to stare at a stale, old conversation and that when they use their computers they should focus on nothing else than skype (and full screen dialog messages notifying them that windows needs to be updated).
It's not just Microsoft, every company seems to believe that their application needs to be fullscreen, all the time. I reality I don't think that anyone run any app in fullscreen, except perhaps video editors or photoshop.
iTunes, Spotify, browsers, editors, everything is shown in fullscreen, and often designed like that. It's doesn't make sense on 27" screen, and it doesn't make sense on an 13", but everyone seems to think that their product is why people have computers, nobody want's to be just a service.
Maybe it's a little like CPU, disk or RAM. We have more of it, so applications use it, while not giving us more actual functionality.
The old ICQ, MSN and WinAmp got it right. Take up as little screen as possible and just sit in the background and do their thing.
Skype in general was, for me, always one of the "how the hell can they be so successful and so crappy at the same time" experiences. Calls are ok (not more than that), but everything else - UI, resource utilization, pricing, and especially messaging - is just horrible.
Messages are so unreliable and inconsistent that they can only be used for something where you don't care that much if it's ever going to be received - which is, I'd assume, not that often. I had a message from my colleague - sitting next to me every day and having Skype open every day same as me - arriving suddenly 6 days after he sent it. And dozens of minutes of delay is just normal.
I mean everyone had instant messaging figured out long before Skype - ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN...It's just inexcusable.
Just goes to show how long a ghost can live inside a famous brand. Skype gained a lot of good will when it first came out and was by far the best thing out there. That hasn't been the case now for at least 10 years and they have living off of that name recognition for a long time.
I remember the first time I used Skype. I think this wasn't too long after the release in '03. Me and my friend called his dad, who was in Canada, from the Netherlands. We could see him and there was hardly a delay, we were super excited and hadn't experienced anything like this before.
For a long time, this experience was tied to the Skype brand. Then FaceTime was released and I could video call my friend in Haiti in high quality without installing new applications, so that's totally replaced Skype for me.
Skype is one of those applications that peaked about ~5years ago. It's been getting worse and worse every in single update since then. (and I mean the UI and the UX, perhaps the voice engine is better but that's not visible to the users).
It's sad. It was so simple and worked well all those years ago.
I only use skype to call 1 person, Before the redesign the first call would never answer, only ring out. The second call worked. A third+ call always has a periodic echo every 8ish seconds.
After the redesign every call now connect pretty fast, but there is no audio or camera for 60 seconds. Every Call & the echo remains.
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[ 89.6 ms ] story [ 3027 ms ] threadNo idea what they were smoking when they decided that their target customer was Snapchat users. Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail. This alone has made it my go-to for mission critical video chats. All I could do was cringe in embarrassment when trying to schedule business meetings and seeing those squiggles pop up all over the place.
Skype UX doesn’t need to be “fun”. It just needs to be usable. Kudos to the powers that be for making a tough call to benefit their core userbase.
So here we have Microsoft trying to leverage an existing brand (Skype) into new territory (social media). The technical aspect or what users actually want is a afterthought.
Microsoft could release their own alternative to current social media apps but they won't just start small and build a new brand.
Did someone mention Skype for Business? (... Live 360 ME)
I made a comment about this in a similar vain: Mozilla wants to overload the Firefox name to the point where it's totally meaningless. The success of the Firefox name is no doubt the reason but this fails to recognize that's not how names work. This direction is exactly the reason why Nintendo called their console "WiiU" and that turned out about as well as this ultimately will.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with Firefox being the name of a single product. The entire underlying premise of this redesign is flawed.
I find I can type, say, jsmith123 into the search box and I'll somehow either get multiple users listed as having that username or a bunch of similarly named accounts, possibly ranked higher than the one I explicitly typed in.
It's really unintuitive and contrary to how people use Skype. It's using the method whatsapp, telegram, et.al use, but they don't really have a discoverability feature. You know someone, or you don't until you know someone who does.
Skype should either have just ditched the username search or embraced it. They tried to make it both, but they really didn't pull it off well, and now there is an entire subset of the userbase you cannot find with their find feature.
This last one on OSx has been particularly bad though. Its just so slow at doing even basic tasks like chatting.
Uncomfortable, yes. Strange, no. Very common for "enterprise" conference services to do this.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=s...
Maybe a lot were like me, and simply didn't care enough to keep using it.
Wait what? I have, at least for personal communications, the exact opposite experience. Skype video often cuts out and pauses, or even entirely drops the connection, at which point me and my friend(s) either switch over to FaceTime (if they have iDevices as well, since its by far the most reliable in my experience) or WhatsApp video (decently reliable and pretty much everyone has it).
I think it's important to include at least one free video chat app when doing a comparison. Have you tried Jitsi Meet[0]?
[0]: https://meet.jit.si/
A link just to make sure: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.en.html
You can still install the latest 7.41.0.101 version of the classic Skype on a Windows 7 or newer system using one of these links:
https://go.skype.com/classic.skype
http://download.skype.com/msi/SkypeSetup_7.41.0.101.msi
https://download.skype.com/5d7ac191986ccb485223c4e4e9e3e4ce/...
No amount of customer support chatting or Microsoft supoort calling could get that account back, or even get someone to investigate the fraud. I suppose that Skype makes money off these transactions so why bother to stop it.
I did log into Skype recently on my old forgotten accounts - one I was using on daily basis and other I tried to delete because of unfortunate username (no response of course happened from Skype back then; leaving account to rotten for period of over 365 days didn't do a thing). Both were working without problems (tho, chat history was gone as they announced), not connected with any Microsoft Accounts.
And honestly, MSN Messenger was the best service MS provided - sans that short time when it was the annoying Windows Messenger bundled with XP
...Except that was around 2 years ago and it still exists - and it's still the only one that comes up when you search Skype for my name.
Oh, and I still can't log in to it, either.
When has this type of thinking ever been a good idea?
That is a mistake regardless of the product, space, etc.
Customer testing: “what feature you do use every day”
“Stories.”
We should put stories in.
Early testing indicated people were not happy. The people involved made their impact, got their promos and moved on.
When Skype was acquired by Microsoft, it was flooded with PMs (primarily) and devs rolled in. I think LinkedIn has done a better job shielding itself from such.
I’m glad to see the rollback, but from talking to friends and family, a lot of damage has been done - mainly around rolling out new design above all else despite degradation in features and quality.
Hopefully they will work to improve "Skype for Business" to work more like Skype.
Skype for Business is just horrible.
1) Messages appear grouped by who I send them to, but there are multiple message threads. This wouldn't be the end of the world, except if I respond on my phone or laptop the responses go to different message threads. Impossible to read back a message thread and have it make any sense.
2) Most of the time, there's a sync issue... I get messages on all devices, but if I reply I only see my responses on the device that I was on when I typed the response. Mix with point 1, and I have no meaningful history being logged.
3) Messages take different amounts of time to get to a phone or a computer.
4) Files will silently fail to send. I look at a conversation, and it looks like my file goes through... then I look back a day or so later and it says, "File failed to send." So aggravating. Can't rely on it at all.
Anyway I know it's probably more to do with the instance my work set up, but this is my first time using Skype for Business since it rebranded away from Lync. And the experience hasn't been good. Give me Slack or Discord or WhatsApp... really anything else. No shortage of options these days.
For the rest, I don't think that skype can work at all when opened on multiple devices. It should be easy enough to uninstall from your phone.
That was the last straw for me before my account got the axe.
(Ideally with the ability of callout, buy a phone number etc)
Lesson learned. Stallman up and stop relying on proprietary systems that spy on you and cooperate with murderous regimes.
They made a technical decision to shelve/bin their native desktop app code, in favour of Electron.
There are 5K public repos on GitHub alone that match a search for "Electron" are they all spying on me and cooperating with murderous regimes?
None of the non-gaming VOIP solutions (I know of) even have voice activation, which drives me crazy.
For text, my friend circle has shifted to just using whatsapp web, again, I'd prefer Signal,or Matrix (or even IRC), but there's the network effect shrugs.
I can live with TS3 and whatsapp over Microsoft Skype any day of the year.
Anyway, it would be great to get in touch with you, I'd like to send you an invite link and see if you could validate some of the ideas. :)
Feel free to ping me if you have any questions.
Disclaimer: I am affiliated with Dialpad.
To be fair, Skype also appears to be trying to add a lot of baggage too.
The investigation took weeks and the final resolution was "the account is gone, the credit in it is gone, just create another account."
The password reset happened two days into a seven day vacation. The account takeover happened while we were flying home. That the attacker waited until we were likely to be completely offline for several hours makes me suspicious that either hotel staff or staff at the hotel's Internet provider were involved. We have contacted the hotel but they seem uninterested.
Just kidding. Slack supports none of these features and neither the other competitors. There is just nothing comparable to skype.
Slack for sure supports voice calls and screen sharing.
When we tried Discord for a while the reliability was ok but some folks had struggled with the user interface.
Eventually IT rolled out Office365 but Teams was so unreliable for most people in my group that we stopped using it for our daily stand-up meetings and switched back to Skype.
Does anyone else feel like there's still room for a dead simple and extremely reliable product in this space? (corporate video conference)
Zoom,
1. Needs better call quality. The audio is often … difficult … particularly if both ends are speaking or if one end has too much ambient noise. (That is, it seems like local noise degrades the incoming signal. (To me, it feels like it believes us to be talking, and essentially mutes the incoming signal so as to not cause a feedback loop; but then we can't hear the incoming. IDK.)
2. Numeric meeting IDs are a terrible, horrible UX coming from Hangouts. Joining meeting "foo" vs. joining meeting 904-857-597. (When calendar integration works, it's nice, but sometimes you need to convey a meeting ID over your voice to another human, and "foo" is just so much easier.)
It's not quite what I'm talking about. That link is unique to your user, kind of weirdly, and is some sort of personal meeting room.
I'd like to assign names to meetings, not to me; every meeting that I happen to schedule the meeting for shouldn't all have the same name; the name should be descriptive of the meeting itself. That is, a meeting about widget production shouldn't be "suzieqmeet" just b/c Suzie Q. scheduled it; it should be called something like "widget-production". A later meeting about spline reticulation could just be "spline-reticulation"; the URL "meet.vc-company.com/spline-reticulation" is obvious, and trivial to transfer over speech to a coworker.
The great thing about Hangout, IIRC, is that it sort of automatically slugifies the meeting subject, so the defaults are pretty close to "magically just works". Trying to convince my entire coworker base to adopt "vanity URLs" is not going to happen, and doesn't really solve the problem.
Yes. Today, there are N somewhat crappy corporate video conferencing solutions. It's feasible to convince a VC to fund a new one, because they do a lot of video conferencing, and really understand the pain points.
Thus, tomorrow there are going to be N+1 somewhat crappy video conferencing solutions. It just seems like one of those "simple on the surface" issues, that turn out to be a massive can of worms.
The apps are free to try if you'd like to. We also do nice hardware setups for meeting rooms. Comments are welcome.
It's a heart, and it attempts and fails to "like" the voice call.
Then I press in the middle of the screen and the sole red button becomes a "disconnect call" button.
How does that get through A/B testing? How does that get through, "hey Aunt Linda, try to make a call." testing?
iTunes, Spotify, browsers, editors, everything is shown in fullscreen, and often designed like that. It's doesn't make sense on 27" screen, and it doesn't make sense on an 13", but everyone seems to think that their product is why people have computers, nobody want's to be just a service.
Maybe it's a little like CPU, disk or RAM. We have more of it, so applications use it, while not giving us more actual functionality.
The old ICQ, MSN and WinAmp got it right. Take up as little screen as possible and just sit in the background and do their thing.
Stacking windows makes them easier to manage, especially on Windows. You just Alt-Tab and it's predictable where the next one will pop up.
90% of the people I've seen, especially regular people, use full screen windows.
Messages are so unreliable and inconsistent that they can only be used for something where you don't care that much if it's ever going to be received - which is, I'd assume, not that often. I had a message from my colleague - sitting next to me every day and having Skype open every day same as me - arriving suddenly 6 days after he sent it. And dozens of minutes of delay is just normal.
I mean everyone had instant messaging figured out long before Skype - ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, MSN...It's just inexcusable.
For a long time, this experience was tied to the Skype brand. Then FaceTime was released and I could video call my friend in Haiti in high quality without installing new applications, so that's totally replaced Skype for me.
Also, once you've tried Whatsapp calls, Viber calls, Google calls... Skype is so much better.
It's sad. It was so simple and worked well all those years ago.
After the redesign every call now connect pretty fast, but there is no audio or camera for 60 seconds. Every Call & the echo remains.
Piece of shit.