I still have a viceral reaction when I hear the Skype ringtone after struggling with and ultimately ending a long distance relationship back in the 00's. It wasn't really Skypes fault, but the...
I still have a viceral reaction when I hear the Skype ringtone after struggling with and ultimately ending a long distance relationship back in the 00's. It wasn't really Skypes fault, but the poor call quality problems combined with dealing with time zone and life differences made me hate using the service. Calls made me feel the distance between the person I was speaking more than the closeness of being able to see them and hear their voice.
My long distance relationship ended up working out, but we both have a lot of trauma from it, and the ringtone still makes my skin crawl and heart rate shoot up. Long distance is awful.
My long distance relationship ended up working out, but we both have a lot of trauma from it, and the ringtone still makes my skin crawl and heart rate shoot up. Long distance is awful.
The wide world has moved on from Skype since they failed during covid. Personally I'll miss Skype which I still use to talk with my 90 year old grandma internationally.
The wide world has moved on from Skype since they failed during covid.
Personally I'll miss Skype which I still use to talk with my 90 year old grandma internationally.
The world moved on from Skype when Microsoft bought it and they started axing all the features that made it useful and letting it languish. It was coasting primarily on network effects, and the...
The world moved on from Skype when Microsoft bought it and they started axing all the features that made it useful and letting it languish. It was coasting primarily on network effects, and the writing was on the wall as soon as Microsoft began poorly integrating it into Teams starting in 2016
or so.
The pandemic's surge of demand paired with Microsoft leveraging their monopoly to catapult Teams to popularity was the deathknell.
I never really felt that Microsoft had a plan for what to do with Skype after they acquired it. If they had cut support for non-MS operating systems, Skype could have been their answer to...
I never really felt that Microsoft had a plan for what to do with Skype after they acquired it. If they had cut support for non-MS operating systems, Skype could have been their answer to FaceTime. It could have been a huge selling point for Windows Phone and Windows tablets (free video and voice calls to basically anyone anywhere), and it could have made the Xbox One more attractive as a media centre (which is how it was originally marketed). Maybe they were worried about antitrust regulations.
Crazy to me that they will essentially kill off the Skype branding. I haven't used Teams. I've heard nothing but bad things about it though, so I would think they would want to keep the brand that...
Crazy to me that they will essentially kill off the Skype branding. I haven't used Teams. I've heard nothing but bad things about it though, so I would think they would want to keep the brand that still has some positive name recognition.
I used Teams a few years (and jobs) ago and I didn't really mind it. Then I got a job with Slack and realized how god-awful Teams was in comparison. And now I'm doing some contract work that...
I used Teams a few years (and jobs) ago and I didn't really mind it. Then I got a job with Slack and realized how god-awful Teams was in comparison. And now I'm doing some contract work that requires Teams and wow...it is incredibly unpleasant to use. Possibly worse than it was before.
I have the same experience. Currently, where I work the IT departments luckily are full in on slack, the business still gets teams. The only thing I like more about teams is video calls and...
I have the same experience. Currently, where I work the IT departments luckily are full in on slack, the business still gets teams.
The only thing I like more about teams is video calls and everything surrounding it. The live transcription for example is quite solid, and generally it seems to play nice regardless of the bandwidth of everyone in the call.
I've been really happy with Slack's Huddle feature, the only thing it's missing for me is the ability to schedule meetings like you can with Zoom, etc. It supports video and screenshare like all...
I've been really happy with Slack's Huddle feature, the only thing it's missing for me is the ability to schedule meetings like you can with Zoom, etc.
It supports video and screenshare like all the other meeting apps, the main hiccup I've seen is people who haven't used it before needing to grant screen recording permissions (which requires an app relaunch on mac).
Huddle is fine, for 1v1 calls that is. For bigger meetings I have noticed it having more hiccups. But yeah, if I had to just use huddles moving forward I would be okay with that. Pretty sure with...
Huddle is fine, for 1v1 calls that is. For bigger meetings I have noticed it having more hiccups. But yeah, if I had to just use huddles moving forward I would be okay with that.
(which requires an app relaunch on mac).
Pretty sure with teams it is the same. Though I haven't used a mac for a while now.
yeah it's standard across all apps on macOS, we use something else for most of our meetings at work so a lot of people I try to huddle with just don't have the permissions set up yet haven't...
yeah it's standard across all apps on macOS, we use something else for most of our meetings at work so a lot of people I try to huddle with just don't have the permissions set up yet
haven't actually used it with a large group, so definitely missing some information there on my end
Teams IMO doesn't deserve the bad rap it gets. Having used pretty much every similar app out there this past decade (Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Meet, Slack, etc), Teams excels at being "decently...
Teams IMO doesn't deserve the bad rap it gets. Having used pretty much every similar app out there this past decade (Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Meet, Slack, etc), Teams excels at being "decently good at everything". The other apps all excel at something and fall down everywhere else.
This is just my experience so don't take it as gospel, others probably have different experiences/opinions: Zoom is the best at handling calls with a massive room (such as a company all-hands or a webinar) but sucks at chat and file sharing. Slack is the best for group chats but video calls are never stable for me. Meet is really easy to use for people who aren't technically inclined but doesn't handle slower Internet connections well. Etc etc. Teams can do all of it well enough and the integration with other MS products is better than the integrations of other services. On average, the call quality is the highest, the most often.
It's not a perfect app by any stretch but it's honestly not bad and I prefer it over anything that isn't Slack.
Discord is honestly awesome as a work communication platform. Only downside is that it's a bit hard to decouple work & private lives on Discord, but if you are ok with disconnecting from personal...
Discord is honestly awesome as a work communication platform. Only downside is that it's a bit hard to decouple work & private lives on Discord, but if you are ok with disconnecting from personal the entire time you are available on work that's not even really an issue.
Does Discord support any of the data retention policies which many businesses have to comply with? I know Slack and Teams have first-class business support with their enterprise customers.
Does Discord support any of the data retention policies which many businesses have to comply with? I know Slack and Teams have first-class business support with their enterprise customers.
I don't think they have a specific business offering, so it's probably very radioactive. No SLA, no data retention policy, and then you have data harvesting that's likely going on. They have...
I don't think they have a specific business offering, so it's probably very radioactive. No SLA, no data retention policy, and then you have data harvesting that's likely going on. They have whatever you post, unencrypted, and they have no guarantee they won't use it for their own gain.
They also smell very much of "running on VC money before the inevitable rug pull," since I doubt Nitro subscriptions net them nearly enough to pay for their expenses.
I use Discord for personal things, but I doubt their offerings are suitable for enterprise use.
Don't get me wrong, MS has PILES of bullshit as well, but since where I work we're going to be forced to use MS anyways, I don't hate the idea of limiting the number of scummy vendors we're dealing with.
Of course on the other hand if I could find some legit teams replacement stack that felt supportable and not just shifting who's going to screw me, i'd jump on it because being beholden to the all holy MS stack is a whole other pile of problems and bullshit
I don't know. Teams is one of the only webapps that constantly gives me log in errors. It is buggy, the animations are incredibly chuggy even on good hardware and it eats RAM. In terms of UX it is...
I don't know. Teams is one of the only webapps that constantly gives me log in errors. It is buggy, the animations are incredibly chuggy even on good hardware and it eats RAM. In terms of UX it is leagues behind Discord and Slack. Also, try and open he Inspect Element tool and look at how many errors you get in the console, I get 50 by just opening Teams in vanilla, albeit Ungoogled, Chromium.
At the same time, what you said is also true: it does everything good enough for most folks.
On a tangent: I am noticing the same pattern of buggy and slow software on more MS web apps like Word Online.
Teams upside is integration. It is not as robust as slack for chat, but unlike slack it very easily integrates with other applications and can help create “one stop “ directions for the less...
Teams upside is integration. It is not as robust as slack for chat, but unlike slack it very easily integrates with other applications and can help create “one stop “ directions for the less technologically inclined.
“It’s in teams” is a nice answer to be able to give to all sorts of questions but it is also objectively worse at what most people get it for (text chat).
It seems fine for video chat and given their behavior I vastly prefer it to zoom but that’s a whole other issue
This comes down to org management and organization, and i'm more referring to the ability to pull system reports through something like powerbi in teams. There's just a "reports" section where all...
This comes down to org management and organization, and i'm more referring to the ability to pull system reports through something like powerbi in teams. There's just a "reports" section where all your reports are and then an "apps" section or whatever for all the stuff you might need to edit and so on.
Yes like every other filesystem innovation you've got about 30 places to store it, but personally I still prefer it to "oops its on one of 8 mapped directories in god knows what subfolder", which is also just an organizational/admin problem.
Which a lot of organizations don't put a lot of time and effort in, at least in my experience. Resulting the messy situation where "it is in teams" effectively comes down "it is somewhere in that...
This comes down to org management and organization
Which a lot of organizations don't put a lot of time and effort in, at least in my experience. Resulting the messy situation where "it is in teams" effectively comes down "it is somewhere in that maze". I know you can get teams pretty tightly organized, but it is rare that I see that happen on an organization level. Sometimes individual teams have people who have put in the time and effort, but that only helps them in that little area.
Well, depending on where you start your search it might or might not return results. Moreover, it isn't always clear what part of teams the search includes. Which you can put down to "user error"....
Well, depending on where you start your search it might or might not return results. Moreover, it isn't always clear what part of teams the search includes. Which you can put down to "user error". But, given that the users I am referring to are a wide array of co workers I am dealing with and the fact that I am not teams support I am putting that one on teams.
Also, I think it often fundamentally hints at a fundamental bigger issue if the question about where things like documents or other documentation are located is answered with “It is somewhere over there”. As it often means there is no rhyme or reason to where things are stored, how versions are kept, etc. Meaning that even if someone uses search, they might get wildly different versions of similar documents because people just do whatever.
Search within New Outlook is similarly awful. I probably use it 50 times per day, and it's rarely an uncomplicated, single attempt with the desired result.
Search within New Outlook is similarly awful. I probably use it 50 times per day, and it's rarely an uncomplicated, single attempt with the desired result.
Teams is one of those things that everyone loves to hate, but for businesses with any significant amount of employees, Skype just wouldn't fit the bill. Teams is video conferencing and a lot of...
Teams is one of those things that everyone loves to hate, but for businesses with any significant amount of employees, Skype just wouldn't fit the bill. Teams is video conferencing and a lot of other functions all rolled into one, like collaboration, calendar, chat, groups, to-do's, some app/service integrations etc. I think the "lot of other functions" part is both what makes Teams so successful and what makes it so horrible to use.
Skype was definitely insufficient, so I'm not crying over its death, but Teams is just a worse user experience than Slack + Zoom in my experience. At my last job we archived communications from...
Skype was definitely insufficient, so I'm not crying over its death, but Teams is just a worse user experience than Slack + Zoom in my experience. At my last job we archived communications from all those workplace apps, so occasionally we'd switch our engineering meetings from our usual Zoom calls to Teams for a few weeks to help someone test a feature, and it was always so much more of a pain in the ass that we spent the first five minutes of every meeting complaining about Teams. Even the non-engineering side of the business didn't use Teams afaik unless a specific customer wanted to, relying on RingCentral instead.
Skype had a pretty cheap way to maintain a virtual number for private use. I hope Teams offers the same… For anyone curious, if you travel a lot or are an immigrant, very often services from back...
Skype had a pretty cheap way to maintain a virtual number for private use. I hope Teams offers the same…
For anyone curious, if you travel a lot or are an immigrant, very often services from back home ignore international numbers. With Skype I have a local number in my home state for that.
I feel your frustration… I used it to call government departments in my home country for a couple of cents per minute (literally 100x cheaper than on my mobile plan). Anyone here tried Viber or...
I feel your frustration… I used it to call government departments in my home country for a couple of cents per minute (literally 100x cheaper than on my mobile plan).
Anyone here tried Viber or Talk360 for international calls?
Not the services you asked about, but I have been using Voip.ms for a few years now. Cheap and reliable (it's easy for me to accept the one outage I experienced considering my Canadian cellular...
Not the services you asked about, but I have been using Voip.ms for a few years now. Cheap and reliable (it's easy for me to accept the one outage I experienced considering my Canadian cellular carrier had a multi-day outage), and it made it laughably easy to call in to a work function when I was in Hong Kong
Let alone the automation it allows (voicemail transcribed & emailed, a set "allow entry" key from the building buzzer, auto-responding to work's totally-secure non-totp MFA, etc)
At first I was a bit surprised to hear this, then I remembered that I haven’t used Skype in probably over a decade now. Still have some nostalgia for that call jingle, but not going to miss much...
At first I was a bit surprised to hear this, then I remembered that I haven’t used Skype in probably over a decade now. Still have some nostalgia for that call jingle, but not going to miss much given how many alternative options there are nowadays.
This news reminded me of this skit from college humor / dropout. I feel like Skype missed their golden opportunity with COVID and then seemingly never recovered.
Prior to the pandemic I associated Skype with video calls (the way we associate Sharpie with permanent marker). I didn’t know about the existence of Zoom until the one in person college class I...
Prior to the pandemic I associated Skype with video calls (the way we associate Sharpie with permanent marker). I didn’t know about the existence of Zoom until the one in person college class I took in early 2020 moved to the platform.
It’s crazy to me how quickly Zoom took over from there on out. To the point where using Zoom as a verb became a common occurrence within the first few months of the pandemic.
I only recall using Skype a few times in middle school, it never seemed to work well but I couldn’t use it anyway because you had to pay for what was essentially minutes.
Teams + Shared OneNote Notebooks are amazing. Teams is just there for the backend, once you set everything up you just use the OneNote App/Program directly. I try to use the Teams chat feature as...
Teams + Shared OneNote Notebooks are amazing. Teams is just there for the backend, once you set everything up you just use the OneNote App/Program directly.
I try to use the Teams chat feature as minimally as possible though since it is laggy and buggy. The sync on mobile is awful.
Also one minor but really annoying thing, if you use virtual desktops, Teams randomly picks one it will always move itself to, so you constantly have to move it back to the desktop you want it on.
I still have a viceral reaction when I hear the Skype ringtone after struggling with and ultimately ending a long distance relationship back in the 00's. It wasn't really Skypes fault, but the poor call quality problems combined with dealing with time zone and life differences made me hate using the service. Calls made me feel the distance between the person I was speaking more than the closeness of being able to see them and hear their voice.
My long distance relationship ended up working out, but we both have a lot of trauma from it, and the ringtone still makes my skin crawl and heart rate shoot up. Long distance is awful.
The wide world has moved on from Skype since they failed during covid.
Personally I'll miss Skype which I still use to talk with my 90 year old grandma internationally.
The world moved on from Skype when Microsoft bought it and they started axing all the features that made it useful and letting it languish. It was coasting primarily on network effects, and the writing was on the wall as soon as Microsoft began poorly integrating it into Teams starting in 2016
or so.
The pandemic's surge of demand paired with Microsoft leveraging their monopoly to catapult Teams to popularity was the deathknell.
I never really felt that Microsoft had a plan for what to do with Skype after they acquired it. If they had cut support for non-MS operating systems, Skype could have been their answer to FaceTime. It could have been a huge selling point for Windows Phone and Windows tablets (free video and voice calls to basically anyone anywhere), and it could have made the Xbox One more attractive as a media centre (which is how it was originally marketed). Maybe they were worried about antitrust regulations.
edit:
Oh, and by the way: https://european-alternatives.eu/alternative-to/microsoft-teams
Crazy to me that they will essentially kill off the Skype branding. I haven't used Teams. I've heard nothing but bad things about it though, so I would think they would want to keep the brand that still has some positive name recognition.
I used Teams a few years (and jobs) ago and I didn't really mind it. Then I got a job with Slack and realized how god-awful Teams was in comparison. And now I'm doing some contract work that requires Teams and wow...it is incredibly unpleasant to use. Possibly worse than it was before.
I have the same experience. Currently, where I work the IT departments luckily are full in on slack, the business still gets teams.
The only thing I like more about teams is video calls and everything surrounding it. The live transcription for example is quite solid, and generally it seems to play nice regardless of the bandwidth of everyone in the call.
I've been really happy with Slack's Huddle feature, the only thing it's missing for me is the ability to schedule meetings like you can with Zoom, etc.
It supports video and screenshare like all the other meeting apps, the main hiccup I've seen is people who haven't used it before needing to grant screen recording permissions (which requires an app relaunch on mac).
Huddle is fine, for 1v1 calls that is. For bigger meetings I have noticed it having more hiccups. But yeah, if I had to just use huddles moving forward I would be okay with that.
Pretty sure with teams it is the same. Though I haven't used a mac for a while now.
yeah it's standard across all apps on macOS, we use something else for most of our meetings at work so a lot of people I try to huddle with just don't have the permissions set up yet
haven't actually used it with a large group, so definitely missing some information there on my end
This is because Slack uses Amazon Chime's SDK for calls which is notoriously buggy and lacking in features.
Teams IMO doesn't deserve the bad rap it gets. Having used pretty much every similar app out there this past decade (Zoom, WebEx, GoToMeeting, Meet, Slack, etc), Teams excels at being "decently good at everything". The other apps all excel at something and fall down everywhere else.
This is just my experience so don't take it as gospel, others probably have different experiences/opinions: Zoom is the best at handling calls with a massive room (such as a company all-hands or a webinar) but sucks at chat and file sharing. Slack is the best for group chats but video calls are never stable for me. Meet is really easy to use for people who aren't technically inclined but doesn't handle slower Internet connections well. Etc etc. Teams can do all of it well enough and the integration with other MS products is better than the integrations of other services. On average, the call quality is the highest, the most often.
It's not a perfect app by any stretch but it's honestly not bad and I prefer it over anything that isn't Slack.
If I had to pick I'd do Slack + Zoom instead of Teams. If we can't afford that I'd honestly prefer a Discord server instead of Teams!
Discord is honestly awesome as a work communication platform. Only downside is that it's a bit hard to decouple work & private lives on Discord, but if you are ok with disconnecting from personal the entire time you are available on work that's not even really an issue.
Does Discord support any of the data retention policies which many businesses have to comply with? I know Slack and Teams have first-class business support with their enterprise customers.
I don't think they have a specific business offering, so it's probably very radioactive. No SLA, no data retention policy, and then you have data harvesting that's likely going on. They have whatever you post, unencrypted, and they have no guarantee they won't use it for their own gain.
They also smell very much of "running on VC money before the inevitable rug pull," since I doubt Nitro subscriptions net them nearly enough to pay for their expenses.
I use Discord for personal things, but I doubt their offerings are suitable for enterprise use.
Not that I know of, but I've never looked into that
This could probably be done with a bot?
You could swap between two accounts, right?
yep issue is just a bit worse UX if you want both work and personal servers available at the same time
Everyone has reasons to handle their data differently, but I really don't like rewarding Zoom for this kind of behavior: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/zoom-lied-to-users-about-end-to-end-encryption-for-years-ftc-says/
Don't get me wrong, MS has PILES of bullshit as well, but since where I work we're going to be forced to use MS anyways, I don't hate the idea of limiting the number of scummy vendors we're dealing with.
Of course on the other hand if I could find some legit teams replacement stack that felt supportable and not just shifting who's going to screw me, i'd jump on it because being beholden to the all holy MS stack is a whole other pile of problems and bullshit
I don't know. Teams is one of the only webapps that constantly gives me log in errors. It is buggy, the animations are incredibly chuggy even on good hardware and it eats RAM. In terms of UX it is leagues behind Discord and Slack. Also, try and open he Inspect Element tool and look at how many errors you get in the console, I get 50 by just opening Teams in vanilla, albeit Ungoogled, Chromium.
At the same time, what you said is also true: it does everything good enough for most folks.
On a tangent: I am noticing the same pattern of buggy and slow software on more MS web apps like Word Online.
Teams upside is integration. It is not as robust as slack for chat, but unlike slack it very easily integrates with other applications and can help create “one stop “ directions for the less technologically inclined.
“It’s in teams” is a nice answer to be able to give to all sorts of questions but it is also objectively worse at what most people get it for (text chat).
It seems fine for video chat and given their behavior I vastly prefer it to zoom but that’s a whole other issue
Yeah, but is it in a group chat, a teams team files thingy, did someone share it with you from their onedrive, is it actually a linked sharepoint?
This comes down to org management and organization, and i'm more referring to the ability to pull system reports through something like powerbi in teams. There's just a "reports" section where all your reports are and then an "apps" section or whatever for all the stuff you might need to edit and so on.
Yes like every other filesystem innovation you've got about 30 places to store it, but personally I still prefer it to "oops its on one of 8 mapped directories in god knows what subfolder", which is also just an organizational/admin problem.
Which a lot of organizations don't put a lot of time and effort in, at least in my experience. Resulting the messy situation where "it is in teams" effectively comes down "it is somewhere in that maze". I know you can get teams pretty tightly organized, but it is rare that I see that happen on an organization level. Sometimes individual teams have people who have put in the time and effort, but that only helps them in that little area.
Doesn't matter...You just search Teams.
Well, depending on where you start your search it might or might not return results. Moreover, it isn't always clear what part of teams the search includes. Which you can put down to "user error". But, given that the users I am referring to are a wide array of co workers I am dealing with and the fact that I am not teams support I am putting that one on teams.
Also, I think it often fundamentally hints at a fundamental bigger issue if the question about where things like documents or other documentation are located is answered with “It is somewhere over there”. As it often means there is no rhyme or reason to where things are stored, how versions are kept, etc. Meaning that even if someone uses search, they might get wildly different versions of similar documents because people just do whatever.
I'll admit I was being cheeky. I do like Teams for communication, but it has destroyed our file management, just like you described.
The search is bad. I’ll search for things I know exist and get no results. Then I’ll find something that matched my search term exactly by hand.
Search within New Outlook is similarly awful. I probably use it 50 times per day, and it's rarely an uncomplicated, single attempt with the desired result.
Teams is one of those things that everyone loves to hate, but for businesses with any significant amount of employees, Skype just wouldn't fit the bill. Teams is video conferencing and a lot of other functions all rolled into one, like collaboration, calendar, chat, groups, to-do's, some app/service integrations etc. I think the "lot of other functions" part is both what makes Teams so successful and what makes it so horrible to use.
Skype was definitely insufficient, so I'm not crying over its death, but Teams is just a worse user experience than Slack + Zoom in my experience. At my last job we archived communications from all those workplace apps, so occasionally we'd switch our engineering meetings from our usual Zoom calls to Teams for a few weeks to help someone test a feature, and it was always so much more of a pain in the ass that we spent the first five minutes of every meeting complaining about Teams. Even the non-engineering side of the business didn't use Teams afaik unless a specific customer wanted to, relying on RingCentral instead.
Skype had a pretty cheap way to maintain a virtual number for private use. I hope Teams offers the same…
For anyone curious, if you travel a lot or are an immigrant, very often services from back home ignore international numbers. With Skype I have a local number in my home state for that.
I feel your frustration… I used it to call government departments in my home country for a couple of cents per minute (literally 100x cheaper than on my mobile plan).
Anyone here tried Viber or Talk360 for international calls?
Not the services you asked about, but I have been using Voip.ms for a few years now. Cheap and reliable (it's easy for me to accept the one outage I experienced considering my Canadian cellular carrier had a multi-day outage), and it made it laughably easy to call in to a work function when I was in Hong Kong
Let alone the automation it allows (voicemail transcribed & emailed, a set "allow entry" key from the building buzzer, auto-responding to work's totally-secure non-totp MFA, etc)
Would absolutely recommend
At first I was a bit surprised to hear this, then I remembered that I haven’t used Skype in probably over a decade now. Still have some nostalgia for that call jingle, but not going to miss much given how many alternative options there are nowadays.
This news reminded me of this skit from college humor / dropout. I feel like Skype missed their golden opportunity with COVID and then seemingly never recovered.
Prior to the pandemic I associated Skype with video calls (the way we associate Sharpie with permanent marker). I didn’t know about the existence of Zoom until the one in person college class I took in early 2020 moved to the platform.
It’s crazy to me how quickly Zoom took over from there on out. To the point where using Zoom as a verb became a common occurrence within the first few months of the pandemic.
I only recall using Skype a few times in middle school, it never seemed to work well but I couldn’t use it anyway because you had to pay for what was essentially minutes.
if he can pull a few months, Lebron James will have had a career longer than Skype was available.
Teams + Shared OneNote Notebooks are amazing. Teams is just there for the backend, once you set everything up you just use the OneNote App/Program directly.
I try to use the Teams chat feature as minimally as possible though since it is laggy and buggy. The sync on mobile is awful.
Also one minor but really annoying thing, if you use virtual desktops, Teams randomly picks one it will always move itself to, so you constantly have to move it back to the desktop you want it on.
Well, there goes Skype as a tool for prank call podcasters....