It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid. They already had everyone and everything in place! But the app is a buggy mess, far worse than Teams, and they just refused to do anything about it.
I guess MS-internal politics? They had their own Teams and that was the preferred product?
They’ve rebuilt popular software many times over in the past.
Even with Skype they rebuilt the entire backend as well when they moved it from a decentralized platform to a centralized platform.
I struggle to believe that this theory holds any water.
It also lends support to an old conspiracy theory that the primary driver for Microsoft buying Skype was so that the service could be centralized so that communications could be monitored and intercepted.
Can confirm, as a Teams and Skype protocol reverse engineerer for Pidgin, that most of the Teams protocol including text messages started as Skype (not the decentralised one) and has had additional layers of stuff added over the years on top. The calling for both Skype and Teams still uses a websocket with a "reverse webhook" called Trouter, which lets the client respond to events as if it were a webserver responding to webhooks, and then does a handoff to WebRTC. When I first started writing the Teams protocol plugin for libpurple, it was easier to start with the Skype plugin than to start from scratch.
No conspiracy neeeded. The simple reasons they bought it was:
1 to buy the users
2 to reign in an upstart empire
3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand
4 to be able to peddle 'Lync'
They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly;
they changed skype from something to chase and desire,
to something to avoid :-/.
A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync,
which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product.
As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'.
It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to.
For a range of years,
the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other..
/s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call..
/s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service
- "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices",
"you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",.
So, skype going from
'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to
'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!'
If it was only Skype, Windows development has turned into a mess, it appears teams are filled with newly grads, without any background on Windows development, or Windows developer culture.
That is why there are now Webview2 usage all over the place, and after 5 years WinUI 3.0 is still behind the WinForms, WPF and even MFC development experience, even though it should have been a plain port of UWP/WinUI 2.0 into standard Win32 infrastructure, so adding almost another 10 years on top (WinRT platform came out in 2012).
I imagine internally they have a hard time staffing the Teams project. Like VSCode is a WebView2 project but it is miles ahead of Teams in quality. At least on the client side features seems far more complex too.
Teams used to use Angular 1 and I think they are still migrating out of it. Microsoft would need to pay me a lot of money to want to dive into that mess. I imagine there are a lot of devs who would love to be VSCode core developers though.
It was also React Electron for a while, but that isn't the only issue with Teams, even if we comparing them running as pure Web application across browser tabs, Teams, Slack, Discord,.....
I really don't know what the Teams team does all day long.
Dealing with old crappy codebases can really tank a product, especially if you don't have management support to fix the broken practices.
I imagine the Teams project gets a lot of pressure to deliver features instead of fixing the underlying problems. While the VSCode project probably only occasionally gets a push from upper management (like to add copilot stuff)
Delivering features on top of an unmaintainable mess just makes the mess bigger.
> It's amazing how much they dropped the ball during Covid.
Afaik Skype was a buggy mess and thereby not a good foundation for development, and very much had a reputation of being software for consumers, not businesses, so not a good foundation to make money.
Microsoft meanwhile is a corporate powerhouse, not a consumer powerhouse. Most of its profits are from corporate software and servers.
So it made sense that they developed MS Teams as a corporate product for their Office product range.
It's closing in on half a billion users and its annual (!) revenue already exceeds the purchase price of Skype. 90% of fortune 100 companies use it, and I think it's the go-to product for virtually all corporates that run on PC/Windows.
Not doing this sooner (14 years ago) is where they definitely dropped the ball. But during covid? I think MS completely nailed it with a hugely succesful rollout of an integrated tech in MS Teams.
I suggest continuing to use it. Your language habits are not the property of marketers and product managers.
Now someday nobody will recognize the name and your meaning will no longer be clear. But until then Skype away, and use bandaids and Kleenex while you do it.
Tangential: I have a U.S. Skype Number (i.e., a real phone number offered by the Skype service) that's mainly used to receive and make (occasional) calls from/to a bank and to receive SMS occasionally. The cost is about $40 a year. With Skype Number not available for purchase since December and the Skype platform (including Skype Number) going away soon, what are some simple, good (and preferably cheaper) alternatives for a VoIP service that works on an iPhone? I do not have any (other) real phone number in the U.S. I guess my current Skype Number cannot be ported or moved to another service.
Are there any alternatives to get a real U.S. phone number that will work in another country for long periods (AFAIK, many providers require the phone to connect to a local cellular network periodically)?
Edit: In case it wasn't apparent, I'm not physically in the U.S.
I was using Google Voice for a while, which is nice because it is free and never had any issues receiving SMS. A US phone number is required to activate, so I used a US relative's phone number to activate and then just disabled all the forwarding features so calls and SMS would never be forwarded to that number.
Unfortunately, I went so long without actually using it that they took my number away (my fault because they did send me a warning but I just forgot about it). Now I'm in the same boat as you as I had switched to a Skype Number after that.
But Google Voice is a decent free option to consider if there's someone in the US who could help you with initial activation. Until Google finally decides to kill it, at least. I'm frankly surprised that Microsoft killed Skype before Google killed Voice.
GP here: I had the exact same experience with Google Voice (linked to my Skype Number several years ago). Sadly, I could never get it to work with another Skype Number again.
I've been using Gvoice pretty much since it started. I'm just as surprised as you that Google hasnt killed it. The writing has seemed to be on the wall a few times but it's still around, thankfully.
When they semi-killed hangouts a couple years ago I thought for sure Gvoice was gone.
Somewhere we are going to get the novel about the quiet hero team anonymously keeping Google voice going all these decades.
contorting to keep it off management's radar, explain away any foibles, redirecting minor funds to get maintenance and tech debt paid off just enough to work another year, someone's going to write that tech story some time.
It felt like it was slowly withering until they rolled it into their business communications suite a few years ago. Now it is pretty much a proper part of Workspace.
I've used Google Voice as my primary number since 2010, and started using it before Google even owned it (i.e., when it was Grandcentral).
Development seems to have (relatively) picked up recently. There was a period of about five years when I don't think there were any publicly announced developments. Now we'll get maybe one a year or so.
I've used Google Voice as my primary number since 2010.
It mostly works flawlessly. It's cool that you can use wifi calling when abroad and the POTS network domestically, all transparently from the POV of the person calling you.
I have noticed that some services (Square, Venmo, and Ticketmaster come to mind) don't like sending 2FA texts to VoIP numbers. I end up needing to use whatever SIM I have at the time or a relative's number for those, and I'm low key anxious I'll be locked out of my account someday.
Do you know how providers detect your country when using wifi calling? Mine says it's only valid while you are within the country, wonder if VPN would work around it.
No idea, but Tello always worked outside of the U.S - Lithuania in my case.
I guess, provider will always consider your country where the phone number is located. Funny thing, while I'm roaming, my IP address will always be Lithuanian. It does not matter where the world I'm currently staying.
I have the same problem and I want something as straightforward and un-scammy looking as Skype. And no, I don't want to configure some SIP client or some stuff like that.
Yep.. in almost every way it should have beat out slack. It did everything better, and had a name. It was so very close, but lost. Mostly I think because of how hard it was to get non-users into it's eco system.
We were one of those companies. I remember that you had to alter the order of users added to a group in order to have multiple groups (the equivalent of "channels") with the same member list. We'd use that trick to essentially have per-project channels. It wasn't necessarily super graceful, but it mostly worked.
When we made the jump to Slack in early 2014, we migrated as much of our Skype history as we could, which was _a project_, but again, mostly worked.
I’m loving this: it’s a complete misfeature that anyone can point out is conceptually just wrong, but also implemented so incompetently there’s a workaround.
they don't even manage it, like they just let it "stay" that way
I think this is the problem with Trillion dollar company, they don't want focus on "small money" problem and they can just buy tech/company if they find it important enough in the future
I can hear the Skype ringtone clear in my head despite not hearing it in years. But I can’t remember the Microsoft teams one despite hearing it multiple times today.
Microsoft help pages claiming that they will not refund your unused credits if your card has expired or details changed. So Microsoft effectively is taking all the users credit for themselves.
Filing a complain with the appropriate EU regulator on this as debit/credit cards expire regularly and that's just an excuse for Microsoft to take your funds.
Legally I'm sure they're covered. We've probably purchased non refundable "credits" that just happen to show in a format that resembles money but absolutely aren't money or exchangeable for money.
It's not their first time at taking our unused money, sorry credits
MS was always going to kill Skype once they purchased it. One way or another.
I remember how it ceased working on Linux once they bought it but I'm not sure whether it had to do with moving to centralised servers or if it had been moved from P2P long before.
> I remember how it ceased working on Linux once they bought it
I can’t speak for long ago, if that’s what you’re referring to, but the last two generations of the Skype client have run just fine on Linux. I’ve been using it for the last five years. My only real annoyance with it (that is, the Linux client rather than Skype problems in general, which have steadily got worse) is that it relies on an org.freedesktop.secrets implementation (e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet) to stay logged in, and so because I stubbornly don’t have such a thing (I have no other software that wants such a thing, and I use Sway so anything will be poorly-integrated), I have to log in every time it restarts. And it’s really slow to start, badly-implemented web tech UI; twenty seconds to start and show the normal logged-in start screen, then it decides you’ve been signed out and takes you back to the login screen… all up, it tends to take almost a minute to start, including typing password. Except that some time in the last couple of months it broke further, and now freezes up for a minute before taking you to the login screen, in which it also requires you to enter username, not just password. So now it’s more like a solid two minutes of startup time, if you’re paying attention to it.
Which thing? Relying on keychain to stay logged in, or bad startup performance, or the most recent minute-long freeze?
GNOME/KDE users should have a keychain running, so it won’t affect them. It’ll only affect people who roll their own stack a bit more. I don’t object to it using the keychain if it’s available, but refusing to keep you logged in if it’s absent is bad. Nothing else acts like that.
I'm saying I think all the issues you are reporting, including the lag times and such, seem specific to your setup, maybe Sway specifically or Wayland. I don't use Gnome or KDE or have any keychain stuff installed, I run Alpine with Awesome, and haven't experienced the same issues you have.
Interesting. Thanks for the correction. Maybe I just dropped it then and never picked it back up. I remember the experience worsening and it was probably the time when other alternatives were propping up so I never went back to it.
Update: I just gave up and uninstalled skypeforlinux-bin. I’m fed up with it. After taking a few minutes to log in (if the window isn’t visible, it doesn’t progress much through logging out and in and all), it looked like everything was fine, but didn’t show contact presence status or display incoming calls, which is something I’ve seen happen once or twice, but those times it sorted itself out after a few minutes, whereas this time it hadn’t after ten minutes, and I’m just done with it. I only used it once a week anyway. Not sure if this is actual Linux client breakage, or bugs in the web tech part of the stack, or some combination.
So for the last while until my family switches to something else, I’ll stick with Skype for Android, which is… not completely broken. But all their stuff is falling apart. In the last few months, Skype for Android stopped receiving calls unless the app is open (or perhaps been opened recently, not sure). Maybe Android background app killing is partly to blame, but nothing else that acts like a dialler has trouble.
Everyone keeps on changing their software and making it worse. :-(
Unless they also make the patents coming with it public, it would be of no use. As long as I remember, Microsoft has no good history of purchasing patents and making them public. Google has (vp7,vp8, Webm as an evolution). But probably some of the patents are expired anyway.
I also doubt that they would open source the ported version (c# I suppose) but they could do this to the previous Delphi version, they developed many useful components so even without the core functionality, UI code might be useful for Lazarus/Delphi developers
I just deleted it from my phone, yesterday. I haven't actively used it in I don't know how many years; maybe briefly last year when traveling o/s and needing to make a landline call to a number back home, but other than that, pretty much no use for years, and lately all I've been getting was crypto spam group chats.
I remember how amazing it seemed when I was doing the "digital nomad" thing in the mid-late 00s, using Skype to redirect my landline number from home to my mobile (some Nokia thing, whatever was the best one for 20-somethings in 2006) with a local SIM as I caught buses around Thailand and Vietnam. It seemed so futuristic and exciting to be able to break free of the constraints of being stuck in one place - to travel around exotic places but still be connected to your work and contacts at home.
That said, most of the calls I received on that trip were telemarketing nuisance calls, so, as always, the reality didn't quite live up to the fantasy. Still, looking back it feels like it was a more optimistic and wondrous time.
I have fond memories of using skype to contact my friends and family circa-2011 when I was working for Nokia in Finland.
Ironically, microsoft killed nokia the same way microsoft killed skype, an acquisition and then strangulation.
if nothing else, it’s at least two times the european tech sector was actively harmed by US tech giants… which isn’t much, but weird that it happened twice.
Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
Nope, Nokia was killed via suicide-by-microsoft-exec. They took in a MS aligned CEO and promptly proceeded to destroy their own chance of competing (using Maemo/meego or android for their phones) by using MS operating system.
I guess one could call it leadership stagnation, but I would argue more it being just plain old stupidity
I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated. There was a vibe of “things are going to change around here, no more free rides, the grown-ups have arrived.” Awful management decisions were made, most of the talent left, and the team from the original company now only exists on paper.
n=1 and all, but I've heard similar stories. European tech companies have very different cultures and ways of making money, shaped by our laws and consumer expectations.
Skype, for example, was used as a pay phone and a simple messaging app before Microsoft bought it. You put in a euro, and you call and message your friends. It mutated into a bloated Microsoft Live app with several different front-ends, including some integrations with Office and various subscription services that sold the same thing in multiple ways. Core features stopped working, too. I'm sure someone liked the Frankenstein monster that it became (I don't kink-shame sadists), but most of the original users, and especially Europeans, did not.
If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype except for taking out a competitor, I'd say the decline would have been the result of managerial incompetence and American managers' lack of understanding of Europe. But of course, once a competitor bought Skype, there was no reason for it to exist anymore, so perhaps that is the reason it died.
Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
> I've worked for a European company acquired by big tech in the US. My experience was that the Americans were quite full of themselves and didn't want to learn how we operated.
Yup, that's also my experience. Americans are just like the unofficial President - they don't take "no" for an answer when they demand something, no matter what, unless you manage to get court judgements because that actually threatens the bottom line.
> Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
I always remember when Wal-Mart tried to come to Germany... and had to leave with its tail tucked in because they just couldn't cope with stuff being done differently here [1].
Edit: Parent more than likely meant Musk as replies to this comment explained, I should have figured that out but it's too late or early or some other excuse.
I assumed GP was referring to Musk. No one voted for him, but he can crash a presidental press meeting to ramble about DOGE propoganda.
But it is hard to tell. They are cut from he same cloth after all, simply separated by a generation of figuring out how to squeeze more out of their labor.
Yeah I agree parent meant Musk. It really is bizarre the power he's been handed. Crazy the party that supposedly backs 'small government' is fine with that even if it takes the form of an unelected fool billionaire being given unreasonable amounts of power and doing nothing but causing damage.
GP probably meant the immigrant billionaire standing next to him all the time, who can't even bother to dress properly to meet with (arguably) some of the most important people in your country, aka Elon Musk.
>Walmart employees are required to stand in formation and chant, “WALMART! WALMART! WALMART!” while performing synchronized group calisthenics.
Do they still do this to this day? This is definitely an -ism of the early 2010's but I figured corporate stopped pretending that "we're family" by the close of the decade.
The smiling argument makes perfect sense. I hear several EU countries simply have a more blunt approach and pretty neutral mannerisms towards strangers. Americans would call the approach "cold", so there's definitely a cultral difference.
> I hear several EU countries simply have a more blunt approach and pretty neutral mannerisms towards strangers. Americans would call the approach "cold", so there's definitely a cultral difference.
Yeah. To put it blunt: When I want to get smiled at, I either woo a partner or go to a brothel.
That sure is a funny way to refer to a president who was elected by both the popular vote and the Electoral College. I'm no fan of Trump, but it sounds like a form of derangement syndrome to believe that he wasn't democratically elected.
I too have worked for a European company bought out by a large American company.
They too didn't understand our culture. They completely ignored the parts of our business that were scalable and taking off, and focused instead on nebulous "synergies". They actually seemed more interested in us taking on their branding than what we actually did. They'd push down demands to chase some latest trends but when we needed something back from them they struggled to give us the time of day.
They also immediately tried to give pay cuts and force immediate redundancies and seemed shocked to discover they couldn't legally do that. So instead they had to polite request that people in our company take a pay cut. I only know of one person naive enough to take them up on that offer.
I left a few years post acquisition, it was clear things would not get better we were just left rudderless because we'd previously been run by the founder for ~25 years and now were run by no-one with no direction.
What both of you are describing is just what normally happens with MOST acquisitions (regardless of the nationality of the acquirer).
Most acquisitions don’t turn into YouTube or WhatsApp/Instagram-level success for the acquirer. The academic literature on CEOs empire building via acquisition is that most of the time it’s value destructive.
I love a good US vs Europe debate but acquisitions aren’t an area where either corporate culture excels. European acquirers are equally as careless with their gobbled up playthings.
What I gather about the differences between American and European attitudes towards work hours and vacation leads me to believe that there's actually a material difference between American and European acquisitions. I'm certain that new Euro bosses don't walk in expecting to be able to pull everyone back from summer holiday on a whim, but I've heard of just such a thing happening when we Americans rolled in.
> Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
What? None of those were EU government owned, all was private. Do people really have this sort of (completely incorrect) view on how things work in Europe? Not even donald was ever stating such ridiculous things
Not true, just some cheap internet meme for people too lazy to bother understanding economics and different principles US and European societies and markets work on.
And the claim of parent that income from sales would go to EU, which is not true, it went to Nokia owners who aren't in any meaning 'EU'. Its like saying any sale of any US private company to some foreign one goes to trump and his government.
Your post is typical lazy propagation of trivially verifiable made up claims, not sure even by whom or for what purpose, but this forum has higher standards
Loved my yellow Lumia 920. I thought the panels and scrolling start screen was much better (concurrently used Android and iOS at that time).
Just like with Zune, it was not part of MS strategy and therefor dropped. You need to keep working on something like this for years to make it successful. Large companies though drop products that are not a huge success after two years, associated with such products is a career killer.
[Edit] I got the Lumia to decide as a CTO at that time if we would go into Windows phones or not. I asked for more Lumias and XBox (to show cross plattform eCommerce) from MS to evangelize inside the company, but was let hung dry. So we did not support Windows phones. They never went full in.
If I remember correctly, the CEO at the time Steve Ballmer said they were betting the farm on mobile and ARM-based tablet computing. They went very hard on mobile until SatNad came along and killed it.
And here we are, in a world where Apple has made arm work wonders for them and Windows still isn't really a thing on ARM 10 years after ballmer resigned.
Then again arm doesn't seem to be necessary when looking at AMDs APU offerings. It was just a decade of intel struggling with their fabs.
Windows is definitely on arm. It just sucks because Qualcomm failed to deliver a good cpu package. The experience is within a stones throw of Apple, though.
I also have one of the new AMD 300 AI platforms, and it still can’t do power right. Either the laptop is miserably slow on battery, or runs way too hot on power.
I think the bigger issue is legacy software on Windows. It is Windows biggest moat and also their biggest albatross. So many companies and individuals rely on a specific piece of software that will never be ported to ARM. Microsoft can’t force the conversion. Developers have no incentive to support both until there is a critical mass of users and there will never be a critical mass of users unless ARM is 3x better than whatever Intel / AMD can deliver. On mobile it got close for a moment in terms of efficiency and then Intel and AMD immediately closed the gap. No incentive for users to switch.
They really should do a clean slate OS where native apps are all C# and legacy stuff is run in a VM. An ARM Xbox would also help develop a gaming ecosystem without the massive legacy concerns.
That was the funny story - Nokia got it's latest CEO (Stephen Elop) from M$, successfully almost-destroyed company, got it acquired by M$ and hopped back to M$. So, probably, it was the plan all along
Exactly. There's a business reason hardware companies like Nokia got killed (because it wasn't just Nokia. Lots of telco hardware companies were making handsets before and aren't anymore). That seems to me to be that Nokia didn't know how to make $100/user/year by controlling the software like MS and Google do (MS with "enterprise" sales and ads, Google with ads)
Also makes the choice for Microsoft, as opposed to anyone else, very understandable. The other choice that "worked" for cell phone companies was to be a Chinese company, with state subsidies amounting to zero, maybe even negative tax, no environmental regulations at all (my favorite whoopsie was an algae bloom that started inside China and reached 1/4th to 1/3rd the way from China to the US. It is terrifying to think about just how many fish, animals and plants must have suffocated when that happened), plus definitely using WAY cheaper labor, maybe even using slave labor.
I think you just hating and out of touch with reality (if this is not satire) cause how much less substance this comment are
the simple reason they die is because they sucks, that's just it. HN user just overthinking this simple reason the CONSUMER want
user just want something that's good, that's why nokia and blackberry die
not because they got killed by another big corpo, but because they can't adapt
Yeah I don't agree with the tone of this comment but the substance is correct. I didn't own a Nokia phone, so I can't speak to that. But Blackberry died because their phones just plain sucked. Even before the modern smartphone era they were unpleasant to use, but at least they were enabling something that nobody else did. But once the iPhone came along (and Android after that), they had competitors who were flat out better than them in every way.
And even that wouldn't have necessarily killed them, if they had adapted quickly to make this new kind of phone. But instead they made the Blackberry Storm as a "hey we can do this touchscreen thing too", but crippled it by giving it a resistive touchscreen which was incredibly unpleasant to use relative to the competition. And iirc they still insisted on tying it to BES, even though their competitors offered an email experience which Just Worked without having to use RIM's server. It seemed (from the outside to be fair) like RIM refused to recognize that the competition had blown them out of the water, so instead of pivoting to catch up they doggedly tried to offer "what we had before, but with grudging minimal concessions to the things our customers want". But that was never going to work, because customers had never liked their original model to begin with. They liked what it enabled for them, but once competitors could offer the same benefits with a more pleasant to use interface, it was over for that model.
Yes, most acquirers bungle the acquisition (regardless of nationality), but the reason these companies decide to sell in the first place is because their future prospects on their own don’t look great.
Skype was a consumer success but consumers violently hate paying for software (just read HN).
The market for video calls-as-a-business is entirely B2B. Skype with their fun whimsical branding and non-sales dominant culture couldn’t hack it. Plus, big dumb enterprises hate screening new vendors, so Microsoft/Cisco/etc were always going to win that space.
Zoom basically swooped in later able to take all the learnings from Skype and go B2B from the start.
I put $10 on an account over ten years ago to make sporadic calls (e.g. customer service in other countries). That account still has $5 left, and I’ve made a ton of calls to many different countries.
What’s a good alternative here? I just want to make outgoing international calls cheaply.
SIP providers. I used Ippi before 2015, but then EU regulations made it illegal to bill more for EU calls than for domestic calls, so I had almost no more use for it.
I'm in the same boat, I wonder if you can use the web interface from a 4g modem to make calls/send&recieve SMS messages. Could install a cloudflare tunnel on it and access it while abroad.
I know you can do sms messages, but I'm not sure about calls.
Perhaps an old Android phone could be used for this?
Nearly same situation here. I recently used it to for travel logistics for a trip to Japan for some local things that didn't have online booking.
From a bit of Googling, Viber may be a reasonable alternative. They're owned by a reasonably non-shady/non-fly-by-night operation (Rakuten), have a desktop app, and let you buy credit without a subscription: https://account.viber.com/en/rates-index
Happy to hear about experiences with alternatives.
Seems reasonable. Rates are more expensive than Skype (almost 2x for some of the destinations I probably want to use), but not catastrophically so. I’ll chuck a tenner in and see how it goes :). Fingers crossed that can last me another decade.
Microsoft killed Skype for me a few months ago: the Linux version simply stopped working, and unless I install a Snap-based one (which I cannot do remotely on family computers), it's now useless.
Also, my Skype credit simply disappeared from the account (granted, it had been sitting idle for a few years, but still).
WhatsApp, Signal and similar apps completely replaced Skype, which stopped innovating years ago. Other than some "automatic captioning" based on Bing, and interface changes that are annoying for computer-illiterate people, barely anything changed.
For several years, Skype had been a very lightweight way to communicate with people with not-so-good computers and flaky Internet connection. Trying to replace it with Jitsi, for instance, quickly shows how much more CPU is needed to run that instead. But then the Linux version started being packaged differently (Electron?), so that was lost as well.
Well, it will likely survive for some time on old companies that still use Skype for Business.
I used to use Skype to call my grandfather's landline back home, until he passed away two years ago. I just opened Skype to scroll through our call history all the way to 2018. It will be gone soon just like he did.
And the amazing algo that made skype work as a P2P system with very little bandwidth circa 2000 is now lost. Locked down in Microsoft's proprietary attic gathering dust while each conf app gets worse as the time goes by.
I'm one of the apparently few people still using Skype, had the same issue with Skype just no longer working one day. But I was easily able to install the Snap package remotely on both my parents' laptops, wasn't any harder than any typical remote install.
As much as Skype has deteriorated, I've happily kept using it since signing up for an account very early, probably in 2004 or even 2003. And I'm not even sure what to replace it with for family communications. I want something that works on desktop, phones and tablets without requiring a power user. Signal is my preference on phones but it doesn't work on an Android tablet. I don't want to use WhatsApp, I've never used any Meta-owned service and that's the number one tech company I want to avoid. So it's not easy to replace Skype.
It lost all hope when it demanded the same login as windows. No longer could I have a semi-annon chat tool. I didn't want a "one password for everything" experience.
Amazing how neglected this service was considering Microsoft paid billions. Are there companies that do acquisitions well without killing the thing they acquire?
When Microsoft acquired Skype (the company), it was clear they would kill it. Skype had previously been bought by eBay, for which it served the purpose of entering a new market. Then, it was bought by some investment funds, for which it served the purpose of making money. However, to Microsoft, which already had its Windows/Live messenger (which copied Skype’s homework anyway), Skype served no purpose except to remove a competitor. They did not have a reason to develop it.
I’m surprised, in some ways, that it took almost 15 years for it to die. If Microsoft absorbed the Skype tech in 1 year and rebranded/reskinned Live Messenger to look like Skype, they could have been done with it in 2012.
Now, they are retiring Live Messenger and Skype. Two technologies have become zero. It is interesting that they chose to go this way.
I am not even sure if Microsoft was interested in the technology. I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network. I believe Microsoft replaced this way of working shortly after acquiring Skype. Perhaps on behalf of security agencies.
Perhaps. I would more readily believe that if Microsoft didn't have an established pattern of killing competitor companies and tech.
I think they really tried to merge Skype with Live Messenger, stripping Skype for parts. And maybe those parts weren't the tech as much as the brand, but we don't know how much tech they adopted.
I seem to recall that Skype had the concept of "super nodes" which could facilitate NAT traversal for of users which didn't have a direct internet connection. Microsoft got rid of that pretty fast and replaced it with Microsoft managed servers (which to be fair seems less sketchy that using random users machines as something akin to a STUN server).
> I believe Skype originally functioned using some kind of p2p network.
It did! It was some impressively cool tech too. At the time, at least in my country, some ISPs would disable your internet access when you didn't pay, but the LAN between subscribers still worked. So obviously nothing worked, except Skype. My theory then was that it would find a path to route around the disconnection by having the Skype client of a different subscriber on the same LAN, that did have internet access, relay your traffic to the rest of the network.
This approach to technology has serious problems. I would send a message to someone and turned off my computer, thinking that the message would be sent whenever the recipient was online. However, that was not the case. The message only arrived when we were online at the same time. Therefore, Skype is completely useless as a tool for asynchronous communication, for the main type of messaging!
Maybe, but somehow it didn't matter very much back then. I remember using private chats mostly as an addition to calls, i.e. when I wanted to send someone a link or a file I was talking about. If I wanted to just send a message to someone regardless of whether they were online, Skype wasn't really an option I considered, it was ICQ, later VKontakte, and now Telegram.
Group chats in Skype though, those were popular. Nothing else had good group chats at the time, but then again, after VK introduced them, everyone I know quickly moved there. I don't know how message delivery worked there, but you could receive messages that were sent while you were offline just fine. Maybe you got them from any one online participant, or maybe the "supernodes" did some sort of store-and-forward thing, or maybe a bit of both.
I'm pretty sure that's how most, if not all, instant messaging services worked 20 years ago... Was a feature, not a bug. The whole idea of sending an instant message. If you wanted to send a non-instant message, you'd send an email instead.
We take the modern internet speeds for granted, at that time the tech behind Skype was top notch and probably when Skype made its way into Windows, that looked like the original destination. But later many questionable decisions made things worse even before the internet became faster and other voice technologies were up to the task. One of them was changing the protocol that made many headsets bricked. Probably from the marketing point of view it was a "if one wants Skype, he or she would buy Windows" step, but obviously it was not
Live Messenger (previously MSN Messenger) was another massive fumble by Microsoft. It was absolutely essential as a teenager in the 00's and people spent insane amounts of time on it. If MS put out a 'dumb' phone with Live Messenger they might have stood a chance when smart phones came around.
Did Skype ever, like, actually work? I gave it a few chances over the years, but personally, despite living in an area with very fast broadband, it was always had quality issues. For me, Ichat and Hangouts always worked better.
I agree that it’s not surprising, but I’d suspect that the name and a lot of the infrastructure will remain in various places. As others in the thread have pointed out, Teams appears to use a lot of Skype’s architecture.
GroupMe is also still listed on the App Store with Skype as the developer, though their website lists Microsoft as the developer instead. GroupMe has seen recent feature updates, so I’d suspect it would be mostly unaffected. Interestingly enough, GroupMe still has a public API [1], so in that sense it is more open than Skype is these days.
Also of note is that the Microsoft Account sign-in screen still accepts legacy Skype names as an alternative for an email address or phone number. It would be interesting if the ability to log into Microsoft Accounts this way outlives Skype itself.
My day-to-day computers have always been Macs. My use of Windows has been relegated to occasional specific devices, like a TabletPC sketchbook or a 3D workstation. I don't think I'd touched Windows in more than a dozen years when I got a gaming handheld last year.
It asked me for a Microsoft account (which I presumed I didn't have) or Skype. I took a guess at my old Skype credentials and proceeded with setup. I was both surprised and upset to discover that by username on the device was a 5 character truncation of my old Skype handle.
My user profile directory on my PC is `c:\users\efrea`, which is exceedingly annoying given my muscle memory typing out my username. I "fixed" this with a couple junction points (both `efreak` as used on my Linux systems, and my first name as was used on my previous Windows systems), because I frequently use RDP from my android tablet and autocorrect keeps changing it to my full username. This is the second annoyance after finding out early on that changing my username doesn't mean changing my profile directory name (at this point there's too much software and scripts with hard-coded paths, both locally and remote, to change it without leaving the junction).
I would vastly prefer my username to be my usual username, with the display name being my real full name, but my Microsoft account apparently doesn't allow this (likely due to my privacy settings).
It's p2p voice, video, and chat without logging. To use it send someone the link and your peer ID and they can connect to you and you can start chatting.
In those 54 minutes I got it working on Chrome, Firefox, and mobile including Safari and Chrome, fixed emojis so it worked (I had to be in the loop for that and walk it through how to fix it). There are no analytics or recording, it just works. It totals 468 lines of code.
Writeup about it:
"How we made a Skype alternative in 45 minutes (video, voice, chat)."
Question from the State of Utopia:[1] would you like a free State-run alternative?
What you could expect if you say yes: our AI infrastructure can currently produce a total of about 1,000 lines of code, this is enough for us to get peer to peer person to person calling on mobile from a browser and Desktop, with voice, video, ephemeral chat that isn't saved at the end of the session, including emojis, and no address book, and no logging or recording or even analytics. We previously got peer to peer filesharing working with webrtc: https://taonexus.com/p2pfilesharing/ it is buggy but worked for us, barely.
We probably can't get multiple people in the same conversation, it could be too difficult for our AI.
So don't get your hopes up, but we could get the basic infrastructure up, barely. Would that be of any benefit to anyone today?
[1] The State of Utopia (which will be available at stateofutopia.com or stofut.com - St. of Ut. - for short) is a sovereign country with the vision of using autonomous AI that "owns itself" to give free money, goods, and services, to its citizens/beneficiaries - it is a country rather than a company because it acts in the interests of its citizens/beneficiaries rather than shareholders.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 376 ms ] threadEveryone is pissed, in our circles at least.
I dislike Teams for ad hoc comms.
We will have to pick something..
Not looking forward to that.
SKYPE suddenly HAS TO HAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER.
Getting Microsoft accounts has to be why.
Nope. We will pick something else.
I guess MS-internal politics? They had their own Teams and that was the preferred product?
Even with Skype they rebuilt the entire backend as well when they moved it from a decentralized platform to a centralized platform.
I struggle to believe that this theory holds any water.
It also lends support to an old conspiracy theory that the primary driver for Microsoft buying Skype was so that the service could be centralized so that communications could be monitored and intercepted.
Ironically, I think this list includes Teams.
(if strings, binary layout and even some subprocess names are to be believed)
1 to buy the users
2 to reign in an upstart empire
3 to buy the goodwill towards a 'cool' brand
4 to be able to peddle 'Lync'
They mismanaged the entire thing spectacularly; they changed skype from something to chase and desire, to something to avoid :-/.
A background to this mess is that MS at the time had an unpopular crappy product called Lync, which was supposed to provide internet phone for companies. But customer's weren't really enthusiastic about adopting their crappy product. As soon as they had acquired Skype, they renamed and reskinned Lync to 'Skype for Business'.
It was annoying and painful to be witness to and to be subjected to.
For a range of years, the machines I had to use, would have multiple versions of "skype" installed, all with the fantastic feature of limitations of which receivers of calls I could see and were allowed to call, and glass walls to avoid them being able to call each other..
/s So wonderful to be locked into various versions of 'skype', with arbitrary limitations on who I were allowed to call..
/s That is really what I am looking for in a replacement phone service
- "No, in THIS version of skype, you can only call people in your own local department, because your company is not paying the the variant where you can all people in your companies's other offices",
"you can't call your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can only call SOME of your CUSTOMERS in THIS version of skype",
"you can't call people on real phones in THIS version of skype",.
So, skype going from 'this enables me to call people all over the place!' to 'this enables me to NOT call people all over the place!'
Enshittification galore.
Whenever I reboot my computer, Skype installs an update.
That is why there are now Webview2 usage all over the place, and after 5 years WinUI 3.0 is still behind the WinForms, WPF and even MFC development experience, even though it should have been a plain port of UWP/WinUI 2.0 into standard Win32 infrastructure, so adding almost another 10 years on top (WinRT platform came out in 2012).
EDIT: it was actually 2012, not 2014.
Teams used to use Angular 1 and I think they are still migrating out of it. Microsoft would need to pay me a lot of money to want to dive into that mess. I imagine there are a lot of devs who would love to be VSCode core developers though.
I really don't know what the Teams team does all day long.
I imagine the Teams project gets a lot of pressure to deliver features instead of fixing the underlying problems. While the VSCode project probably only occasionally gets a push from upper management (like to add copilot stuff)
Delivering features on top of an unmaintainable mess just makes the mess bigger.
Afaik Skype was a buggy mess and thereby not a good foundation for development, and very much had a reputation of being software for consumers, not businesses, so not a good foundation to make money.
Microsoft meanwhile is a corporate powerhouse, not a consumer powerhouse. Most of its profits are from corporate software and servers.
So it made sense that they developed MS Teams as a corporate product for their Office product range.
It's closing in on half a billion users and its annual (!) revenue already exceeds the purchase price of Skype. 90% of fortune 100 companies use it, and I think it's the go-to product for virtually all corporates that run on PC/Windows.
Not doing this sooner (14 years ago) is where they definitely dropped the ball. But during covid? I think MS completely nailed it with a hugely succesful rollout of an integrated tech in MS Teams.
https://www.kitklarenberg.com/p/signal-facing-collapse-after...
https://yasha.substack.com/p/signal-is-a-government-op-85e
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/court-docs-show-fbi-can-interc...
https://drewdevault.com/2018/08/08/Signal.html
https://www.city-journal.org/article/signals-katherine-maher...
I don't even use skype, yet I say "I skyped my grandma on Sunday" and similar, using any number of other apps. It'll be a hard habit to break.
Now someday nobody will recognize the name and your meaning will no longer be clear. But until then Skype away, and use bandaids and Kleenex while you do it.
Are there any alternatives to get a real U.S. phone number that will work in another country for long periods (AFAIK, many providers require the phone to connect to a local cellular network periodically)?
Edit: In case it wasn't apparent, I'm not physically in the U.S.
Unfortunately, I went so long without actually using it that they took my number away (my fault because they did send me a warning but I just forgot about it). Now I'm in the same boat as you as I had switched to a Skype Number after that.
But Google Voice is a decent free option to consider if there's someone in the US who could help you with initial activation. Until Google finally decides to kill it, at least. I'm frankly surprised that Microsoft killed Skype before Google killed Voice.
When they semi-killed hangouts a couple years ago I thought for sure Gvoice was gone.
contorting to keep it off management's radar, explain away any foibles, redirecting minor funds to get maintenance and tech debt paid off just enough to work another year, someone's going to write that tech story some time.
Even if it's fictional it will be a good read.
Development seems to have (relatively) picked up recently. There was a period of about five years when I don't think there were any publicly announced developments. Now we'll get maybe one a year or so.
It mostly works flawlessly. It's cool that you can use wifi calling when abroad and the POTS network domestically, all transparently from the POV of the person calling you.
I have noticed that some services (Square, Venmo, and Ticketmaster come to mind) don't like sending 2FA texts to VoIP numbers. I end up needing to use whatever SIM I have at the time or a relative's number for those, and I'm low key anxious I'll be locked out of my account someday.
I guess, provider will always consider your country where the phone number is located. Funny thing, while I'm roaming, my IP address will always be Lithuanian. It does not matter where the world I'm currently staying.
There was a time when whole companies were on Skype the way they're now on Slack.
It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged it.
It's incredible how badly Microsoft mismanaged a lot of products. It genuinely makes me think they're aware of it at this point.
All the telephony side of Teams is very clearly Lync in a trench coat.
When we made the jump to Slack in early 2014, we migrated as much of our Skype history as we could, which was _a project_, but again, mostly worked.
they don't even manage it, like they just let it "stay" that way
I think this is the problem with Trillion dollar company, they don't want focus on "small money" problem and they can just buy tech/company if they find it important enough in the future
It's not their first time at taking our unused money, sorry credits
I remember how it ceased working on Linux once they bought it but I'm not sure whether it had to do with moving to centralised servers or if it had been moved from P2P long before.
I can’t speak for long ago, if that’s what you’re referring to, but the last two generations of the Skype client have run just fine on Linux. I’ve been using it for the last five years. My only real annoyance with it (that is, the Linux client rather than Skype problems in general, which have steadily got worse) is that it relies on an org.freedesktop.secrets implementation (e.g. gnome-keyring, kwallet) to stay logged in, and so because I stubbornly don’t have such a thing (I have no other software that wants such a thing, and I use Sway so anything will be poorly-integrated), I have to log in every time it restarts. And it’s really slow to start, badly-implemented web tech UI; twenty seconds to start and show the normal logged-in start screen, then it decides you’ve been signed out and takes you back to the login screen… all up, it tends to take almost a minute to start, including typing password. Except that some time in the last couple of months it broke further, and now freezes up for a minute before taking you to the login screen, in which it also requires you to enter username, not just password. So now it’s more like a solid two minutes of startup time, if you’re paying attention to it.
GNOME/KDE users should have a keychain running, so it won’t affect them. It’ll only affect people who roll their own stack a bit more. I don’t object to it using the keychain if it’s available, but refusing to keep you logged in if it’s absent is bad. Nothing else acts like that.
So for the last while until my family switches to something else, I’ll stick with Skype for Android, which is… not completely broken. But all their stuff is falling apart. In the last few months, Skype for Android stopped receiving calls unless the app is open (or perhaps been opened recently, not sure). Maybe Android background app killing is partly to blame, but nothing else that acts like a dialler has trouble.
Everyone keeps on changing their software and making it worse. :-(
I also doubt that they would open source the ported version (c# I suppose) but they could do this to the previous Delphi version, they developed many useful components so even without the core functionality, UI code might be useful for Lazarus/Delphi developers
I remember how amazing it seemed when I was doing the "digital nomad" thing in the mid-late 00s, using Skype to redirect my landline number from home to my mobile (some Nokia thing, whatever was the best one for 20-somethings in 2006) with a local SIM as I caught buses around Thailand and Vietnam. It seemed so futuristic and exciting to be able to break free of the constraints of being stuck in one place - to travel around exotic places but still be connected to your work and contacts at home.
That said, most of the calls I received on that trip were telemarketing nuisance calls, so, as always, the reality didn't quite live up to the fantasy. Still, looking back it feels like it was a more optimistic and wondrous time.
I have fond memories of using skype to contact my friends and family circa-2011 when I was working for Nokia in Finland.
Ironically, microsoft killed nokia the same way microsoft killed skype, an acquisition and then strangulation.
if nothing else, it’s at least two times the european tech sector was actively harmed by US tech giants… which isn’t much, but weird that it happened twice.
Both Nokia and Skype went under due to usual European leadership stagnation and comfort before getting bought. Thankfully both sales funneled enough funds into EU to bootstrap a startup culture here.
I guess one could call it leadership stagnation, but I would argue more it being just plain old stupidity
n=1 and all, but I've heard similar stories. European tech companies have very different cultures and ways of making money, shaped by our laws and consumer expectations.
Skype, for example, was used as a pay phone and a simple messaging app before Microsoft bought it. You put in a euro, and you call and message your friends. It mutated into a bloated Microsoft Live app with several different front-ends, including some integrations with Office and various subscription services that sold the same thing in multiple ways. Core features stopped working, too. I'm sure someone liked the Frankenstein monster that it became (I don't kink-shame sadists), but most of the original users, and especially Europeans, did not.
If Microsoft had a purpose for Skype except for taking out a competitor, I'd say the decline would have been the result of managerial incompetence and American managers' lack of understanding of Europe. But of course, once a competitor bought Skype, there was no reason for it to exist anymore, so perhaps that is the reason it died.
Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
Yup, that's also my experience. Americans are just like the unofficial President - they don't take "no" for an answer when they demand something, no matter what, unless you manage to get court judgements because that actually threatens the bottom line.
> Still, I wouldn't blame Europe so quickly. American big tech often fails to do business here within the local culture and laws, too.
I always remember when Wal-Mart tried to come to Germany... and had to leave with its tail tucked in because they just couldn't cope with stuff being done differently here [1].
[1] https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-...
̶Y̶o̶u̶ ̶m̶e̶a̶n̶ ̶T̶r̶u̶m̶p̶?̶ ̶H̶e̶'̶s̶ ̶a̶ ̶d̶i̶s̶a̶s̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶v̶o̶t̶e̶d̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶h̶i̶m̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶u̶l̶d̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶a̶s̶h̶a̶m̶e̶d̶,̶ ̶b̶u̶t̶ ̶h̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶u̶n̶f̶o̶r̶t̶u̶n̶a̶t̶e̶l̶y̶ ̶v̶e̶r̶y̶ ̶o̶f̶f̶i̶c̶i̶a̶l̶.̶
Edit: Parent more than likely meant Musk as replies to this comment explained, I should have figured that out but it's too late or early or some other excuse.
But it is hard to tell. They are cut from he same cloth after all, simply separated by a generation of figuring out how to squeeze more out of their labor.
GP probably meant the immigrant billionaire standing next to him all the time, who can't even bother to dress properly to meet with (arguably) some of the most important people in your country, aka Elon Musk.
That's the official 1.
Do they still do this to this day? This is definitely an -ism of the early 2010's but I figured corporate stopped pretending that "we're family" by the close of the decade.
The smiling argument makes perfect sense. I hear several EU countries simply have a more blunt approach and pretty neutral mannerisms towards strangers. Americans would call the approach "cold", so there's definitely a cultral difference.
Yeah. To put it blunt: When I want to get smiled at, I either woo a partner or go to a brothel.
That sure is a funny way to refer to a president who was elected by both the popular vote and the Electoral College. I'm no fan of Trump, but it sounds like a form of derangement syndrome to believe that he wasn't democratically elected.
They too didn't understand our culture. They completely ignored the parts of our business that were scalable and taking off, and focused instead on nebulous "synergies". They actually seemed more interested in us taking on their branding than what we actually did. They'd push down demands to chase some latest trends but when we needed something back from them they struggled to give us the time of day.
They also immediately tried to give pay cuts and force immediate redundancies and seemed shocked to discover they couldn't legally do that. So instead they had to polite request that people in our company take a pay cut. I only know of one person naive enough to take them up on that offer.
I left a few years post acquisition, it was clear things would not get better we were just left rudderless because we'd previously been run by the founder for ~25 years and now were run by no-one with no direction.
Most acquisitions don’t turn into YouTube or WhatsApp/Instagram-level success for the acquirer. The academic literature on CEOs empire building via acquisition is that most of the time it’s value destructive.
I love a good US vs Europe debate but acquisitions aren’t an area where either corporate culture excels. European acquirers are equally as careless with their gobbled up playthings.
Yes, it was used as a backdoor to scrap user data when the computer was not in use. That's why i uninstalled it.
Knew a developer who worked there.
Day 1 of aquisition - there were 4 layers of managers between him and Steve Ballmer.
A year later there were 8. Tjis is how much bureaucracy and managers MS added in only one year
What? None of those were EU government owned, all was private. Do people really have this sort of (completely incorrect) view on how things work in Europe? Not even donald was ever stating such ridiculous things
Stagnation and risk averseness is pretty much the default when it comes to most major European companies. In almost any sector.
And the claim of parent that income from sales would go to EU, which is not true, it went to Nokia owners who aren't in any meaning 'EU'. Its like saying any sale of any US private company to some foreign one goes to trump and his government.
Your post is typical lazy propagation of trivially verifiable made up claims, not sure even by whom or for what purpose, but this forum has higher standards
Yes, risk aversion.
Of course there are highly innovative and successful companies in Europe, but they are usually highly specialized or an exception to the rule.
It wasn’t always the case of course, but the last ~15 years or so have been a disaster.
> verifiable made up claims
Well yes, it’s rather easily verifiable. The biggest “tech” company in the EU is SAP after all.
It’s a but confusing is your comment supposed to be sarcasm? Otherwise how exactly are my claims “made up”?
> would go to EU, which is not true, it went to Nokia owners who aren't in any meaning 'EU
It’s very obvious that they didn’t mean that especially if you read what they said next. Not sure how one can misinterpret it.
nokia did that to themselves, microsoft aquisition just prolonged its inevitable ends
Just like with Zune, it was not part of MS strategy and therefor dropped. You need to keep working on something like this for years to make it successful. Large companies though drop products that are not a huge success after two years, associated with such products is a career killer.
[Edit] I got the Lumia to decide as a CTO at that time if we would go into Windows phones or not. I asked for more Lumias and XBox (to show cross plattform eCommerce) from MS to evangelize inside the company, but was let hung dry. So we did not support Windows phones. They never went full in.
I think this is about company culture as a whole too, MS only know how to make software
this is same problem with google too, with pixel device is very underwhelming success given how many resource they have
(Former Touch Diamond user here.)
Then again arm doesn't seem to be necessary when looking at AMDs APU offerings. It was just a decade of intel struggling with their fabs.
I also have one of the new AMD 300 AI platforms, and it still can’t do power right. Either the laptop is miserably slow on battery, or runs way too hot on power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
https://web.archive.org/web/20090112172352/http://research.m...
https://read.seas.harvard.edu/~kohler/class/cs261-f11/singul...
https://web.archive.org/web/20180228191626/https://archive.c...
the Board and Shareholder knew that it was sinking ships so it want cashout to Microsoft at least before its going to rubble
Also makes the choice for Microsoft, as opposed to anyone else, very understandable. The other choice that "worked" for cell phone companies was to be a Chinese company, with state subsidies amounting to zero, maybe even negative tax, no environmental regulations at all (my favorite whoopsie was an algae bloom that started inside China and reached 1/4th to 1/3rd the way from China to the US. It is terrifying to think about just how many fish, animals and plants must have suffocated when that happened), plus definitely using WAY cheaper labor, maybe even using slave labor.
the simple reason they die is because they sucks, that's just it. HN user just overthinking this simple reason the CONSUMER want
user just want something that's good, that's why nokia and blackberry die not because they got killed by another big corpo, but because they can't adapt
And even that wouldn't have necessarily killed them, if they had adapted quickly to make this new kind of phone. But instead they made the Blackberry Storm as a "hey we can do this touchscreen thing too", but crippled it by giving it a resistive touchscreen which was incredibly unpleasant to use relative to the competition. And iirc they still insisted on tying it to BES, even though their competitors offered an email experience which Just Worked without having to use RIM's server. It seemed (from the outside to be fair) like RIM refused to recognize that the competition had blown them out of the water, so instead of pivoting to catch up they doggedly tried to offer "what we had before, but with grudging minimal concessions to the things our customers want". But that was never going to work, because customers had never liked their original model to begin with. They liked what it enabled for them, but once competitors could offer the same benefits with a more pleasant to use interface, it was over for that model.
Yes, most acquirers bungle the acquisition (regardless of nationality), but the reason these companies decide to sell in the first place is because their future prospects on their own don’t look great.
Skype was a consumer success but consumers violently hate paying for software (just read HN).
The market for video calls-as-a-business is entirely B2B. Skype with their fun whimsical branding and non-sales dominant culture couldn’t hack it. Plus, big dumb enterprises hate screening new vendors, so Microsoft/Cisco/etc were always going to win that space.
Zoom basically swooped in later able to take all the learnings from Skype and go B2B from the start.
What’s a good alternative here? I just want to make outgoing international calls cheaply.
I know you can do sms messages, but I'm not sure about calls.
Perhaps an old Android phone could be used for this?
From a bit of Googling, Viber may be a reasonable alternative. They're owned by a reasonably non-shady/non-fly-by-night operation (Rakuten), have a desktop app, and let you buy credit without a subscription: https://account.viber.com/en/rates-index
Happy to hear about experiences with alternatives.
Also, my Skype credit simply disappeared from the account (granted, it had been sitting idle for a few years, but still).
WhatsApp, Signal and similar apps completely replaced Skype, which stopped innovating years ago. Other than some "automatic captioning" based on Bing, and interface changes that are annoying for computer-illiterate people, barely anything changed.
For several years, Skype had been a very lightweight way to communicate with people with not-so-good computers and flaky Internet connection. Trying to replace it with Jitsi, for instance, quickly shows how much more CPU is needed to run that instead. But then the Linux version started being packaged differently (Electron?), so that was lost as well.
Well, it will likely survive for some time on old companies that still use Skype for Business.
Is there another solution that has this functionality?
I find that surprising - you could do something like "snap install skype" from the command line. Do you not have remote command line access?
As much as Skype has deteriorated, I've happily kept using it since signing up for an account very early, probably in 2004 or even 2003. And I'm not even sure what to replace it with for family communications. I want something that works on desktop, phones and tablets without requiring a power user. Signal is my preference on phones but it doesn't work on an Android tablet. I don't want to use WhatsApp, I've never used any Meta-owned service and that's the number one tech company I want to avoid. So it's not easy to replace Skype.
I’m surprised, in some ways, that it took almost 15 years for it to die. If Microsoft absorbed the Skype tech in 1 year and rebranded/reskinned Live Messenger to look like Skype, they could have been done with it in 2012.
Now, they are retiring Live Messenger and Skype. Two technologies have become zero. It is interesting that they chose to go this way.
I think they really tried to merge Skype with Live Messenger, stripping Skype for parts. And maybe those parts weren't the tech as much as the brand, but we don't know how much tech they adopted.
It did! It was some impressively cool tech too. At the time, at least in my country, some ISPs would disable your internet access when you didn't pay, but the LAN between subscribers still worked. So obviously nothing worked, except Skype. My theory then was that it would find a path to route around the disconnection by having the Skype client of a different subscriber on the same LAN, that did have internet access, relay your traffic to the rest of the network.
Group chats in Skype though, those were popular. Nothing else had good group chats at the time, but then again, after VK introduced them, everyone I know quickly moved there. I don't know how message delivery worked there, but you could receive messages that were sent while you were offline just fine. Maybe you got them from any one online participant, or maybe the "supernodes" did some sort of store-and-forward thing, or maybe a bit of both.
But when communicating with family or with business contacts Skype was the main way, incl. when it came to instant messaging.
https://www.macstories.net/iphone/microsoft-releases-windows...
GroupMe is also still listed on the App Store with Skype as the developer, though their website lists Microsoft as the developer instead. GroupMe has seen recent feature updates, so I’d suspect it would be mostly unaffected. Interestingly enough, GroupMe still has a public API [1], so in that sense it is more open than Skype is these days.
Also of note is that the Microsoft Account sign-in screen still accepts legacy Skype names as an alternative for an email address or phone number. It would be interesting if the ability to log into Microsoft Accounts this way outlives Skype itself.
[1]: https://dev.groupme.com/
It asked me for a Microsoft account (which I presumed I didn't have) or Skype. I took a guess at my old Skype credentials and proceeded with setup. I was both surprised and upset to discover that by username on the device was a 5 character truncation of my old Skype handle.
I would vastly prefer my username to be my usual username, with the display name being my real full name, but my Microsoft account apparently doesn't allow this (likely due to my privacy settings).
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/eparto-virtual-phon...
Sad to see it go.
http://taonexus.com/p2p-voice-video-chat.html
It's p2p voice, video, and chat without logging. To use it send someone the link and your peer ID and they can connect to you and you can start chatting.
In those 54 minutes I got it working on Chrome, Firefox, and mobile including Safari and Chrome, fixed emojis so it worked (I had to be in the loop for that and walk it through how to fix it). There are no analytics or recording, it just works. It totals 468 lines of code.
Writeup about it:
"How we made a Skype alternative in 45 minutes (video, voice, chat)."
https://medium.com/@rviragh/how-we-made-a-skype-alternative-...
--
My original question:
Question from the State of Utopia:[1] would you like a free State-run alternative?
What you could expect if you say yes: our AI infrastructure can currently produce a total of about 1,000 lines of code, this is enough for us to get peer to peer person to person calling on mobile from a browser and Desktop, with voice, video, ephemeral chat that isn't saved at the end of the session, including emojis, and no address book, and no logging or recording or even analytics. We previously got peer to peer filesharing working with webrtc: https://taonexus.com/p2pfilesharing/ it is buggy but worked for us, barely.
We probably can't get multiple people in the same conversation, it could be too difficult for our AI.
We can't build something as complicated as a browser (our attempt: https://taonexus.com/publicfiles/feb2025/84toy-toy-browser-w...
So don't get your hopes up, but we could get the basic infrastructure up, barely. Would that be of any benefit to anyone today?
[1] The State of Utopia (which will be available at stateofutopia.com or stofut.com - St. of Ut. - for short) is a sovereign country with the vision of using autonomous AI that "owns itself" to give free money, goods, and services, to its citizens/beneficiaries - it is a country rather than a company because it acts in the interests of its citizens/beneficiaries rather than shareholders.