Why does skype suck

What's the point of an IM system that's so heavily bloated it takes multiple minutes to start at login on the platform they own? Coming from a primary linux background, having to wait obscene quantities of time for basic messaging outlook, skype to start is a huge time sink. They're so much better at what they do and free.

One thing I wish Pidgin would do is be better equipped to message with 'non-buddies' in an organization. Also,there are some people in my org I still can't figure out how I would find with the 'people search' dialog. Sign-out on screen lock would be nice in my situation, mainly because with the native S4B client they make a probably missed conversation into an email so I'll notice it more readily from wherever, which is nice enough, though I would prefer if it actually logged me out..

Additionally, some. I still get messages they show up in the notification area , but they are in no window whatsoever. Yes, I notice this too, it is frustrating. I think there is some disconnect between a new IM session and the existing IM windows. Why the Skype authors decided to do something different to existing IM software and require some form of acknowledgement I have no idea.

Why all IMs cannot be considered unacknowledged until you start typing? That would make more sense IMHO. Minimum viable product I guess. Sometimes the UI just stops painting. I don't know if they are writing custom UI functionality or what, but Pidgin's "boring" use of the stock GTK UI elements has been much more consistent and reliable. And yes.

I completely agree, stock, working, tried and tested GTK UI is much more reliable, much more consist. The fun bit is that Windows has had boring UI lbiraries that work, even before GTK was so solid, and they continue to exist.

However at least for the Office products, they seem to do something.. Skype seems the worst of the bunch, but I have seen other office apps experience weird drawing bugs from time to time. It's as if the various email domains were unique and you couldn't email wasn't interoperative. In my experience it's useless when logged in on multiple devices. Calls and messages show up in random locations and I don't get notifications. That's pretty broken for my needs.

So my team has moved to slack but S4B for screen sharing demos and video calls only. I want to have it on my phone so I get IMs when I'm not at my desk, but when I am at my desk it's crazy that I don't see notifications on the desktop.

Exactly - and this is during the time where Macs have become commonplace in the corporate world and Linux desktops, while still rare, are definitely a thing. It took ages for the Mac S4B client to support recording meetings, our IT answer to this was 'just have someone on Windows record the call'. No one in our group of 38 people runs Windows 36 Mac and 2 Linux What to destroy the value in what you purchased MS.

We went from Openfire to Skype for Business as part of a move to Office It wasn't entirely smooth, but that was partly on me, I treated our employees like people who understood the basics of computing, but they proved me drastically wrong. Some history first. When we started with O years before, we had recently finished moving from Communicator on our server to O based S4B. I had been experimenting with alternative options and had an Openfire server set up in testing but no real plan to utilize it when S4B had an outage.

Our company was left without an IM client suddenly and we depended on it. It took me a matter of minutes to roll out Openfire and we were up and running. It was successful enough that when the outage ended, we didn't switch back.

Fast forward a few years and the new boss moved us back onto what was now a much more reliable S4B service. We've been with it and mostly satisfied Now a sane response might be to revisit Openfire, but no, the new boss is MS all the way. What's up with that?? So, I tested Teams and found it better in some ways that interested me. It is superior in MFA, multiple sign on locations, and a couple other things.

I had the conversation where I said "MS is moving to teams, it's not an option, so we had best get a jump on this while we still have a choice" and similar such. We're doing some other transitions so our IT team moved to Teams That was all it took for us to determine that the Teams was not going to be anywhere remotely close to a smooth transition for the majority of our company employees.

Thus we're still S4B and sticking with it until MS forces us off or MS actually makes Teams a usable replacement for our average employee. You mentioned Teams not "letting us know if someone is online, away, or offline" which is something Teams actually can and does do, but it's not obvious to our average user.

That's the issue. It's not that it can't or doesn't but rather that it's not easy for the average user to see how to do. Really shite reputation on the OS, phones were dead. Gaming console seems to be slowly losing ground, servers is dying, c. Microsoft Teams which is lacking in some essential IM functions like letting us know if someone is online, away, or offline.

I've not used Teams much, but it does appear to show me who is online and how long everyone else has been offline. So many times we say "do you have skype for business" and they say "oh yes, I have skype", then we can't meet because they are trying to use skype to join the meeting not skype for business and can't figure out how I use Microsoft products.

I have a Skype for Business included in another subscription, but after trying it for a month about a year ago I abandoned it completely for webex. Skype for business screen sharing is horrible! Time wasted on glitches and disconnects is just not worth it.

Webex or TeamViewer on the very same machines works great. Even Windows to Windows sessions. If you're just trying to make a phone call, sure, it works, but the same as the free personal Skype. And yes, the UI got less intuitive. For example, we spent a long time trying to explain where the 'share screen' button is, and the person unable to find it, because we forgot he was not a presenter and so the UI elements are missing, not disabled with a tooltip explaining why it wasn't usable.

Wouldn't want to clutter the guest UI with controls they can't use anyway, right? In a large conference with a remote presenter, they spent a while searching for a button or menu to full-screen t. I had an annoying surprise helping someone important but not very tech-savvy 3 days ago.

A couple, actually, since I'm not normally helping remote users and knowledge of these gotchas is "tribal". After the call I confirmed the Mac version just does not allow a PC user to take control of the mouse and keyboard control.

MS always silently ignores features in their ports to mac even when version numbers are the same --as true in the IE5 port of 20 years ago as in the latest Office port.

I conn. S4B compares poorly with pretty much all of its business oriented competitors. Does it? I was even part of a review panel to look at alternatives, and while the Cisco products seemed technical superior, they were also a shitload more expensive. S4B is effectively free since we already have licensing for O, so it's a no-brainer. If I accumulate more than 20 conversations, the UI isn't able to handle it missing conversation windows, solid white chat screen sometimes requiring I restart the client.

Screen sharing for some folks ends up just giving a black screen fairly often. This has not yet happened to me, I don't know if it's something about their system or somehow misusing the feature, but haven't had the issue otherwise.

Wish there were more push-back on the move from transnational to subscription services. Subscription is a response to what corporates want. If you buy something it's an asset capex , if you subscribe it's opex.

From an accounting POV opex is easier to deal with and looks better on the balance sheet, so MS have just responded to their market. Home users don't like the subscription model, but that is not MS's primary revenue stream. While I know that some corps love subscriptions, I think the narrative has been dominated by software vendor who stand to profit massively from moving the industry away from transaction to subscription services as their products mature and upgrade revenue becomes challenged and the support burden is complicated with transnational MS couldn't cut XP off as readily as they wanted to, due to perception problems.

One key facet, MS had subscription type licensing for a long time prior to O O is all abou. MS's handling of Skype is "good" example of how to run a product right into the ground:. I used to use Skype for cheap calls to international landlines from my mobile. It used to be flawless over s 3G connection. Then they shittified it so it could not manage a call without dropouts on anything less than 4G.

What g. They may be hurting Skype with all that they are or are not doing It's just Lync renamed. There are still two very different pieces of software, and they are not remotely compatible. Clear as Mud, I know.

So MS should just fork it, and not destroy what used to have a reasonable interface for single users. I don't know what their major malfunction is; but MS has a singular "talent" for taking wildly successful Products and turning them into useless piles of shit. I was a huge user of Skype for years and made sure it was implemented in my workplace. Today, it is the complete opposite, I hate it with a passion. Here are my reasons:. As a work tool, I really don't need to update a collaboration software every week or even twice a week.

Sure, if it's a privacy or security issue, warn me that an update is needed. If not, you can just let me know once every months. That's it, nothing else. It was doing that fine in the original versions, stop trying to shove useless features that are not requested or needed.

There is no way you can coat this. We had Skype for desktop, then windows 10 came around and apps were all the craze, they created a Skype app, tried to move the whole user base to it, which I unfortunately did, losing all previous chat history. Then months later, they told us the app wasn't working out and said we should move back to Skype desktop? Yet again losing history. How does the saying goes? Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I was out the door at that point.

Skype uses ports ports 80 and to avoid possible blockage, or throttling, of segregated ports. It also uses them to ease necessary proxy configuration in environments that force man-in-the-middle monitoring of all outbound traffic.

This particularly includes China, where dealing with the Great Firewall of China is particularly important. It should not for ANY reason use ports 80 or by default which it does. I'm always surprised at work when people decide to use Skype for meetings. It's so much easier to use something like Zoom instead - it's a lot more straightforward to use, and there's a lot less hassle involved. The easiest thing is what the other person also uses, and in the case of any business it'll be whatever the business decides is the standard.

Zoom is great. However, many of us have built up professional Real Skype as opposed to S4B. These get used for lots for one going, collaborative conversations over the day, sometimes switching from chat to video. Now that they are trying to turn Real Skype from an excellent app needing some bug fixes into a failed snapch.

My company uses Skype. We all have a Skype for Business account, but nobody uses it because it's inferior in every way to the regular Skype which isn't that great itself these days. So we all have to have two accounts. Calling someone I haven't talked to in a while is now a huge hassle. I love how if Skype is "running" but minimized or otherwise unable to deal with the notwork, large fragments of conversation will pass it by without a trace. The only way to notice is if you have a different copy of Skype that did capture that fragment, or if you completely remove and reinstall Skype.

They have like implementations that they rewrite every couple years, so it's hard to keep track, but I think most of them have historically been accurately described as "sucky". Stay connected with friends and family on Skype for Web and enjoy group video calling, instant messaging and much more right from your browser. There's a thread for those. S kype K ills Y our P uppy E veryday. Skype was really the only IM client worth having, right up until Microsoft bought it because it was the only IM client worth having.

Then, Microsoft being Microsoft, quality began to predictably decline almost immediately. Which is a perfectly normal thing because browsers are full-blown software platforms, and they happen to be much, much better at running software than Windows at least pre-UWP or Linux. And if you don't like it, just make another software platform that implements completely sandboxed, install-free execution of any apps, is an open standard, and is designed to be portable to any kind of device.

Also you'll need to go back in time like 20 years when it was the fucking time to do so. It's a first-winner-takes-all economy after all. Then let me run it in my browser of choice, instead of making me install a browser for each fuckin app.

Yes, running a browser-based app is more efficient. Skype always sucked and I always hated it. My hatred grew when my former employer forced this shit on all employees. Oh, the memories, oh, the pain And then I changed jobs and learned that thah company had subscription for Skype Business. Still Skype, but it's always a step up - I thought. And you know what? It was even worse.

After the recent office update I had to add both accounts to into one Onedrive. But apps have been converging over the last year. If I disable versioning on a Sharepoint library those options wont be available either. But yeah it would be nice MS could allign those things instead of just giving them the same name. And, no, that button on the top right is to add another person to the conversation.

This is below discourse standards at this point. Hell, it's almost at SSDS standards at this point. No amount of me yelling at my boss will get us to move off of Skype, but maybe Skype will finally suck so bad even my bosses will realize how much shit it really is and move us to something that offers something even AOL thought of in the 90s. All that does is give me a popup version of the left panel. The context menus and buttons are all the same.

At least their UI is consistently horrific. God, that's shitty. Now I know how Blakey feels when his shit threshold is passed. No wonder he's insufferable so often. Solution: just uninstall Skype and tell Windows that you don't want it, and to never install Skype again.

Giant ass emoticons, when on a message by themselves. Seriously, just look at the size of those things. Also they are flatter now, because of course they are.

A stupid smiley button after each message. Apparently the Emoticon picker on the left side and the Moji picker on the right side of the message input weren't enough.

No, we need to be able to react to each message individually. Want to tell people you're not in front of the computer so they don't bother talking to you? Tough luck. Contacts lists are gone. You wanted to create lists to organize your contacts? Oh, you had already created lists grouping your contacts? Haha, fuck you. That's gone. Report abuse. Details required :. Cancel Submit. Vijay A. Verma Volunteer Moderator. Hi storasdiedas I am Vijay, an Independent Advisor.

I am here to work with you on this problem. May I request a small help from you? These forum posts are not read by Microsoft engineers.