Embrace .... Extend .... Extinguish!

Or in this case probably get people to migrate to Teams, then .... All your data are belong to us!

…but before you extinguish, apply a very large dollop of enshitification.

After all, why have a perfectly good and extremely popular application when you can turn it into a steaming pile of useless, buggy, unreliable crap.

Go Microsoft Go!!!!

"enshitification"

It's the alternative 3rd E.

I had been using Skype for a over a decade to keep in touch with family overseas, but the service gradually became worse and worse to the point when I last used Skype a couple of years ago it was almost unusable. The video would go really pixelated so peoples faces would look like Picasso painting, the audio would be distorted and it kept dropping the call.

For months I tried all sort of things to sort it from trying a different webcam, running a Ethernet cable across the room to the laptop rather than using WiFi. But in the end i just gave up on it and moved my family over to Google meet app. Which worked fine on the same laptop with the same internet connection, hardly ever dropping calls or having issues with the video or audio for 2 year now.

I suspect the problems were actually caused by the skype servers being overloaded and because MS had lost interested in it at that point and knew the writing was on the wall they didn't do anything about fixing it.

I still use Skype to videocall my parents. I haven't received any notification about it being shut down yet.

During the pandemic we tried a family group call just once in Skype. The video looked like Realplayer and there was a constant echo as the sound from group call participants interfered with each other so we moved on to Zoom for group calls.

Another successful Microsoft acquisition...

this does not impact Skype for Business...yet

Don't use it myself, but Wikipedia confirms my understanding that Skype Business is essentially a completely different product- apparently known formerly as Microsoft Lync- which had the Skype branding slapped on it.

Which will, of course, cause confusion regardless among those not au fait with the pointlessly-confusing subtleties of MS's branding and/or who don't understand the difference.

If there's one thing I suspect will never change about MS, it'll be their marketing department's decades-old habit of using the same brand for ten different things and- for added confusion- its flip side, rebranding the same product with ten different names. Both of which "Skype for Business" is a perfect example of, but very far from the only one.

Correct.

That change made Lync and Skype entirely unusable, so we cancelled them both and moved to Slack.

Thought it disappeared years ago.

The only thing I use Skype for is calling U.S. toll free numbers. What alternatives are there?

"The only thing I use Skype for is calling U.S. toll free numbers. What alternatives are there?"

I find it amazing that companies are still paying for toll-free numbers. With nation-wide calling in the US, there is not longer a cost to calling those companies from a mobe. To call those places from outside the country has always meant a direct number and a fee if you don't have an international plan or a pre-purchased calling card. What's really annoying is having a debit/credit card that has a toll-free number printed on it for service but not a direct dial line so when they cancel the card when you use it overseas, you are sunk until you can find a way to call them and get something resolved (if they are willing. Wells Fargo wasn't going to do anything when that sort of thing happened to me while traveling.)

> Wells Fargo wasn't going to do anything when that sort of thing happened to me while traveling

I'd guess that was your first mistake. I'm not American, and all Wells Fargo used to mean to me were words that were stereotypically painted on the side of stagecoaches that got robbed in the Wild West era.

In recent years, I've heard numerous stories that paint them as being an extraordinarily sleazy and disreputable bank, including a big scandal involving employees signing people up for services they didn't ask for.

I suppose Wells Fargo figured out that if they couldn't beat the thieving criminal scum, they might as well join them.

"What's really annoying is having a debit/credit card that has a toll-free number printed on it for service but not a direct dial line so when they cancel the card when you use it overseas, you are sunk until you can find a way to call them and get something resolved"

True. On my "things to do upon receiving a new credit or debit card" checklist is a reminder to look up the direct dial phone number to use in case the card is lost or stolen, and to record that in my password manager's entry for that card. I also record the toll-free number, because having it on the card is of little use if what I need it for is to report the card has been lost.

Well that's annoying. My last remaining use case for skype was calling my elderly parents who flatly refuse to get smartphones and who live on another continent. Anyway, 15 minutes of googling and hunting through options and I got to keepcalling as an alternative. Promptly deleted my skype account, abandoning the last couple of $ credit I had there in the process. No way I'm going to put up with teams for anything other than consulting with ms dependent firms who are paying me plenty of money to put up with it. Even assuming you can do something as prosaic as call a landline in another country from teams.

I did a quick Google search. Apart from stuff that only works on a phone or involves a social media account, alternatives to Skype include Google Meet and an open-source system called Jami (https://jami.net). One advantage of Jami is that it's point-to-point with no server in between. It appears that you only need a server for the two ends to find each other. Jami offers a connection service and you can build our own.

A useful feature of Skype is "Skype In". You can get a phone number in any supported country, and if someone dials it the call gets forwarded to your Skype device.

That's occassionally pretty dang useful. Friend of mine used it to get a job overseas, partly because he looked to be "local" so far as recruiters are concerned. I've used it to buy a house when I've been out of the country - solicitors etc could phone me (though the timezone difference was a bit of a nuissance!)

I'll miss that. Still, in today's world so many more people are used to WhatsApp, etc. so maybe it doesn't matter anymore.

Does anything else provide a similar function?!

"an open-source system called Jami ... It appears that you only need a server for the two ends to find each other ... and you can build our own."

The Home Office are going to really love that one. No publicly known service to serve a warrant to.

I have been using Jitsi for some time now and it works very reliably. Hate teams - nuff sed.

There used to be all sorts of P2P options for voice comms and many dropped off when many switched to Skype. PPL then went lemming like to Zoom and I never like either since there's a big bad company in the middle unconstrained by the same privacy regulations as telcos. I've bookmarked the Jami and Jitsu websites and will look into those later. From time to time I do collaboration hobby projects with people overseas and calling is just too expensive for something that isn't going to generate revenue or not much. I have fond memories of Hotline and my friend and I ROFL when our black cats starting meowing at each other over the link. Ogre and Panther were such good cats.

Is there anything that can call a landline from a PC? I'm not well up on chat apps these days, but I know a disabled gentleman who finds Skype much easier than manipulating a handset.

Depends how much he wants to pay. Any SIP line and client will be able to call a landline.

Going forward, M$ is a hard no. Aside from my work machine where I have no choice for the next 18 months, if you need M$ to reach me, I am unreachable.

I've been living in South Africa for twenty years now, but I still have to communicate with various government services, a pension and insurance company, and the odd business in the Netherlands (my country of origin) several times a year. In many cases just calling them is still a much better and quicker way of getting anything done than email., but all they have is landline numbers. For the past 20 years I've been using Skype for this. Not very often, but whenever I do I really need it. It's also been a godsend when doing business overseas. For most OTT calls Whatsapp works fine, but sometimes you really have to call a landline.

I don't have Windows on any of my computers, much less Office and I haven't even seen Teams up close. That's not going to change. Over the years I've looked for alternative calling options that would let me make VOIP calls from a PC or Android phone to a landline for Skype-like rates (10% or less than what a regular call would cost me) but so far I haven't found any.

So I'm not a happy chappy right now. Skype for Linux and Skype for Android has been my lifeline. No longer. Not sure what I'm going to do about that.

"I haven't even seen Teams up close."

Call yourself lucky.

Everything that is easy and efficient in Zoom, WhatsApp, Google Meet, or Signal is a real pain in Teams.

The number of meetings where the first 10+ minutes were lost due to connection or sound problems are too many to count.

The rotting smell of Skype has been around for too many years.

There was a time when everybody had a Skype address. It was the first, last and only choice for most people to call others via their computers. It was just a form of VoIP but incompatible with the relevant IETF standards, so you could only call a Skype user using Skype. I think that's why everyone had a Skype address, and so that was it's true value: it's ubiquitous address book. Then Microsoft bought it. Then they pushed Teams. Then Skype's user-base withered. What an expensive waste. Should have made it compatible with SIP et al.

I remember that SIP was not compatible with any of the standards, which was pretty irritating at the time.

And one of the results of that was that SIP was broken by network translation and by firewalling. Skype didn't have that problem because Skype isn't SIP

SIP is just a badly designed protocol. The reason we wound up with SIP is that the existing protocols required more programming skills, and were implemented in the network stack, and for both reasons it was too difficult to get a Linux implementation. The nature of Linux development ("The cathedral and the bazar") means that stuff which required co-operation between different segments of the development community just couldn't happen. That's still a problem now (as you can read in The Register), but it was even worse 30 years ago.