Windows 11 Drops Skype As a Default App (theverge.com) 48
Microsoft is shoving Skype out of sight in favor of Microsoft Teams, which gets a highlight spot in the new center-aligned taskbar and deep integration into Windows. The Verge reports: Today's Windows 11 news is all about where Microsoft sees computing going over the next few years, but it's just as much the story of how Skype has flourished and ebbed since its $8.5 billion acquisition a decade ago. Five years ago, Skype was the big name in internet calling and video, and Microsoft made it an "inbox app" for Windows 10 that was included at installation and launched at startup by default. Now, after a pandemic year that has had more people using their PCs for voice and video than ever before, Skype was nowhere to be seen in the Windows 11 presentation or materials.
The future vision that Microsoft had for Skype everywhere has turned into a reality -- but that reality made competitors Zoom and FaceTime into household names instead. Back in June, when Microsoft made Teams available for personal accounts, the company still paid lip service to Skype, saying, "For folks that just want a very purpose-built app, Skype is a great solution, and we support it and encourage it." But now, if you want to use Skype, you're going to have to go find it in the Microsoft Store like any other app. A company spokesperson tells The Verge: "Skype is no longer an inbox app for new devices that run Windows 11. The Skype app is available to download through the Microsoft Store for free."; Skype joins OneNote, Paint 3D, and 3D Viewer as the apps that will no longer come with the OS.
The future vision that Microsoft had for Skype everywhere has turned into a reality -- but that reality made competitors Zoom and FaceTime into household names instead. Back in June, when Microsoft made Teams available for personal accounts, the company still paid lip service to Skype, saying, "For folks that just want a very purpose-built app, Skype is a great solution, and we support it and encourage it." But now, if you want to use Skype, you're going to have to go find it in the Microsoft Store like any other app. A company spokesperson tells The Verge: "Skype is no longer an inbox app for new devices that run Windows 11. The Skype app is available to download through the Microsoft Store for free."; Skype joins OneNote, Paint 3D, and 3D Viewer as the apps that will no longer come with the OS.
Is MSFT becoming Google? (Score:4, Funny)
Skype worked, then MSFT touched it and it became a horrible mess. Then MSFT introduced Teams and now Teams is favored child. Next, we'll see MSFT depreciate Skype.
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Re:Is MSFT becoming Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
Except that Skype for Business is not Skype in any way. It was something else called Microsoft Communicator/Microsoft Lync which was rebranded to Skype, but it wasn't related Skype in anything but name and ownership of the brand.
Re:Is MSFT becoming Google? (Score:5, Interesting)
>Except that Skype for Business is not Skype in any way.
However it has been the thing on my work PC called Skype for many years.
Teams is the Teletubby version of Skype crossed with the Barny version of Outlook. I mean that both in terms of colour scheme and dumbing down of the interface. We are assured that Skype will go away soon enough. This is one of the many reasons I mostly use my work PC as a conduit to log into the Linux boxes where I can do work with tools that don't treat me like a child.
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No, Microsoft just repackages the same communications app over and over again.
Lync became Skype for Business which then became Teams.
The problem with Skype for Business is that it isn't Skype, so interoperability was sketchy at best. Some people had great luck with it, others, not so much.
Google, on the other hand, creates an app, then creates 3 more that do the same thing but are completely incompatible, then kills them all, only to releaes another 5 apps to do the same thing all over again.
At least with M
Re:Is MSFT becoming Google? (Score:4, Insightful)
Google, on the other hand, creates an app, then creates 3 more that do the same thing but are completely incompatible, then kills them all, only to releaes another 5 apps to do the same thing all over again.
That's because Google makes 100 gajillion dollars a year from search/advertising. Everything else is just a distraction. You can see pretty much every product group discussion within Google: "We made 100 gajillion dollars last year from search/advertising. How much did your group make? What percentage of 100 gajillion is that then?". So they can just keep faffing around with side projects forever, but the only thing that really matters to them is search/advertising.
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Lync became Skype for Business which then became Teams.
I'm pretty sure the apps known as Lync and Skype for Business are different from the app called Teams. Teams is an Electron app [wikipedia.org], which Lync/Skype for Business is not.
Re:Is MSFT becoming Google? (Score:4, Interesting)
That's the thing, Microsoft won't make a product the default unless they've fucked it up to a point where no-one wants to use it any more. At one point "VoIP call" or "videoconference" was pretty much synonymous with Skype, but Microsoft managed to fuck it up so badly that, as TFA points out, when you say "videoconference" or whatever today what you really mean is Zoom.
Same thing with Microsoft Teams, a crappy third-rate copy of Slack. Even some of Microsoft's own business units use Slack internally because Teams is such a piece of shit. Which means Microsoft is making Teams the default, until they discontinue it after a few years when they realise no-one wants it.
Now if only they'd adopt Oracle (the database, not the company), or SAP (the software, not the company), and give it the Microsoft-fail treatment they're so proficient at...
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Teams can bite my ass, it's like they took the worst aspects of forum boards, irc, and discord and frankensteined them into an amorphous akira blob of garbage.
Totally agree (Score:3)
A few examples:
If you want to PM someone you search for their name, click on it and write "Hi". Your chat input prompt then immediately loses focus as you type the next sentence, because teams decided that the window needs to be redrawn. Everything you just wrote is not entered into Teams. So you reach for the mouse to set focus in the chat
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I don't disagree that it's a horrible mess. Microsoft clearly was reacting to the threat from Slack.
The problem is that rather than re-thinking why they had a problem, they just ginned up a shitty new user interface for the existing back-end of sharepoint.
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The problem is that rather than re-thinking why they had a problem, they just ginned up a shitty new user interface...
For some reason, this reminded me of Mozilla's Firefox :/
Every desperate measure calls for another f*-up of the user interface and taking away control from users, while rewarding managers with exuberant salaries [itdm.com].
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Skype worked, then MSFT touched it and it became a horrible mess.
Yep, and it looks like the same people who ruined Skype were assigned to work on Teams.
Teams is indescribably awful to use.
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Is there a open source and preferably decentralized or self hosted alternative to skype? At least for text chat and voice calls. Maybe it's time to start convincing my friends to use yet another program.
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Jitsi used to be a viable FOSS replacement. Not sure where it stands today.
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Note; When I said t
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Well if you don't mid the lack of a desktop app (relax mobile apps are available)
I would only use desktop, so, I guess, this does not work for me.
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I mainly use Skype when I need to make international calls, or when I travel and want to make local calls without a local SIM card.
Is there any good alternative to Skype for that? Reasonably cheap, works in most countries etc.
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Skype worked, then MSFT touched it and it became a horrible mess.
IMO Skype was a mess pretty much from the get-go, a terrible bloated replacement for MSN Messenger (which itself was like a bloated alternative to Yahoo Messenger, which in turn was a bloated alternative to pre-AOL ICQ, which I suppose could be argued was a bloated alternative to IRC, but if you wanted to talk to girls in the early oughties IRC was never an option and you pretty much had to climb up the ladder of bloat, so...)
It was the "go-to" app for voice mostly because of network effect and low barrier
Fun fact (Score:2)
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Why is Microsoft insisting on these dark patterns to try and fool users into creating a MS account? It's almost, but not quite, as bad as the ridiculous onedrive set up that unless you're really careful moves many of your files onto the "cloud". Hint: I want a local account, I do not want my files on the cloud, I don't want my laptop desktop synced with my main computer (who came up with that ridiculous idea?) These dark patterns are offensive
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Agreed. To me they're not only offensive, I find them also sociopathic.
What's even better is Apple is not far behind the pattern of what MS was doing since at least the turn of century.
As long as the collective corpocracy will support such behavior by buying their products, it is unlikely to change anytime soon.
MS’s way of working (Score:3, Insightful)
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
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The old model. M$ has managed to create a new model. When a corporation blatanly shifts from winning customers to scamming their wallets, people notice and don't like them any more.
New M$ model:
Can't compete in a market segment because the customers hate you and only use you when they have to, buy a company that can and you have new market share.
People still hate M$ and start jumping off the product M$ bought to it's competitors (early stages of the market segment so competitors are still very active). They
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I so hope you're right. I've seen the rise of Microsoft, and it would be great to see its graceless fall.
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Embrace, extend, extinguish.
Huh? That makes no sense. They *bought* Skype. Why would they want to EEE it? They could already do whatever the heck they wanted and they did.
I seriously think you have no idea what the EEE strategy is or how it worked.
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It's not that, because the point of "embrace, extend, extinguish" is that they don't have to buy the thing. Microsoft bought Skype and could have just closed it down if they had wanted to, but it's a source of revenue for them.
Even now it's profitable, it's just that the world has moved on and everyone wants something like Slack where it's integrated into other products. Video chat isn't impressive anymore, and in fact Skype isn't so great with large numbers of participants, and it's built in to a load of o
Replacing 1 unused app for another (Score:2)
Microsoft acted as a band of thieves by stealing all my call credits after 6 months.
Never will I use Skype,Teams or any other crap app from Microsoft.
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Microsoft acted as a band of thieves by stealing all my call credits after 6 months.
Never will I use Skype,Teams or any other crap app from Microsoft.
This^^^. I was actively using Skype. I had about $20 I had deposited to make calls back to the US while traveling abroad. Then one day the credit just disappeared. No reason, just gone. Contacted "customer service" and it was restored, for a year, then it was gone again.
And nothing of value was lost (Score:2)
Skype joins OneNote, Paint 3D, and 3D Viewer as the apps that will no longer come with the OS.
Am I alone in thinking that nothing of value has been lost here? Heck, I hadn't even noticed the OneNote came with Windows 10. It also seems to come in Office 365: I ignored both.
How could this happen?! (Score:1)
It's because msft doesn't buy software companies (Score:2)
It buys thier customers.
Anti-MIDAS (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft is like an anti-MIDAS. Everything they touch turns to mediocre or worse.
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Microsoft is like an anti-MIDAS. Everything they touch turns to mediocre or worse.
True, but it doesn't really worry them. Microsoft have a marketing company who can push mediocre to the masses, and half of those who don't like mediocre have to go along for compatibility.
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Merdas - everything they touch turns to shit.
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Skype was pretty good when it first appears, before Microsoft, It get steadily worse with every release after they bought it out.
7 Windows 11 stories in less than 12 hours?? (Score:2)
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Still better than 11 Windows 7 stories in 12 hours.
Team's is the worst (Score:2)
I don't know what it is, but I despise teams. Absolutely hate it.
Out of all the collaboration platforms, when someone sends me a meeting request that uses Teams I instantly shutter.
Every time my laptop boots, Teams loads and throws some error message, the UX is clunky and trying to be too many things - a file manager, a conference platform, and more. No.
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Blame javascript kids with their bloated NodeJS and Electron garbage.
Which is surprising considering slack is also built on the same garbage, although it too uses hundreds of megs of memory.
Don't even get me started with VSCode, the new fashionable uber-bloated IDE, written using html/css/javascript, running on the same garbage and consistently using over a gig of memory!
Are C/C++ devs a dying breed?!
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Nasty clunky software (Score:2)
Can we uninstall? (Score:1)
If I can uninstall it then I don't care if it comes with the OS or not. Cleaning bloatware is part of installing a new operating system anyway.
I'm more concerned with being able to put the 3D stuff back. Hopefully it's in their store and free.
Profit! (Score:2)
1. Embrace
2. Extend
3. ???
4. Profit!