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Om on Skype: "Microsoft now talks about Teams being their focus, showing that even today they haven’t realized what made Skype a cultural, consumer force. Microsoft Teams is a terrible product — and I dread using it. In simplest terms, Teams is a perfect encapsulation of a bureaucratic, archaic, and outdated 50-year-old company that is trying to reinvent itself as an AI leader."
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io I hope my employer doesn't read this, but Teams is an abomination and needs to be put down.
(a they/them) @skinnylatte @chris Teams is fine, does the job, whatever, but HOLY HELL Microsoft, way to absolutely fuck up. Skype had a massive head start, the pandemic hit, Zoom blows up, so MS… pivots??? To a whole different brand??? Teams???
Almost as dumb as killing “tweets” and rebranding to “X”.
@renwillis @skinnylatte @chris although skype did feel like old tech. Even during pandemic it felt outdated when i heard it. Although haven't used it lately.
@yurigaga @skinnylatte @chris Skype was really good for years. Microsoft had an incredible brand, "skype" was a verb. How many times have MS actually had the thing, squandered it by resting on their laurels, let a new rival dominate, then they "rebrand" & "relaunch" too late?
Skype. Smartphones. Browsers. Most of the Surface products. Xbox is looking dire.
@skinnylatte shows how out of touch these companies are. Teams is something adults dread having to use. Skype is something kids go out of their way to use (ime). I liked Skype back when it was one of the few such apps I could run on Linux and I'm still using it for long-distance calls and for getting calls on the Japanese phone number I have through them.
@skinnylatte I remember being mad at Skype when it first came around because it wouldn't work with Pidgin, and I needed a separate place for my chats.
@mayintoronto @skinnylatte I still like Skype. It’s simple, and does what I want it to do, and is less annoying than Zoom, say. No way am I using Teams to chat with a friend in Canada. It;s a shame there's no Mac desktop version of Signal.
@arratoon There is indeed a desktop Signal for Mac, and I can confirm it works fine…
@polarweasel Sweet! Thank you.
@arratoon No problem!
Heads up, too, that if you're using a multi-channel audio interface for calls — I use a Focusrite Vocaster, for example — you need to send only ONE audio input channel to Signal. The problem manifests as you sounding super-choppy to the person on the other end. You can use something like Blackhole (free) or Loopback (commercial, from Rogue Amoeba) to set up a loopback device to make it work.
@skinnylatte If it's sold to enterprise, its UX is often booby prize
@skinnylatte It's important to remember the earlier failures.
Microsoft had Lync for business things and Skype as a consumer product. Everyone hated Lync and so they rebranded it as Skype for Business. Skype for Business was kind-of fine. It felt like Skype, but weird in various ways.
Then Slack came along and Skype's text chat mode wasn't adequate, so they built Teams with the same core as Skype for Business (some of which was shared with Skype).
I actually don't hate Teams. It's awful on Windows, but their Mac, Android, and iOS clients are fine. It manages to screw up a text field, but what Microsoft product doesn't these days?
But now they were trying to convince businesses to move away from a thing called Skype and persuade consumers to move to a thing called Skype. And that was a mess, so they hit on the idea of making a new consumer thing called Teams (which was incompatible with the business thing called Teams) and encouraging everyone to use that. But this didn't work because no one wanted to move to using a thing that looked like a corporate tool for fun personal chats.
So now their only option was to completely kill the Skype brand, because it was providing drag on their 'move to Teams' narrative for corporate users who never quite understood why Lync was called Skype sometimes.
If anyone is confused by this, remember that it's now over seven years since Satya Nadella decided that accessibility had to be part of the core mission for every Microsoft product and the Xbox DVD player app still doesn't remember your subtitle setting from one disk to the next.
It's also around eight years since Satya Nadella told the world that mixed reality (AR, for those of us without Microsoft-flavoured buzzwords) was the future of the company and would be the core of all future products.
It's around three or four years since Satya Nadella decided that AI was the future of all Microsoft products.
Leadership at Microsoft means spouting buzzwords with no follow through, it doesn't mean anything involving a plan that lasts for more than one semester.
1. Gross. Predictable, and still gross.
2. I'll have to find some replacement that isn't Whatsapp or another Fecebook tentacle (looks like Rakuten's Viber is a drop-in 1:1 for the way I use Skype).
3. From the linked article: "At one point, I even suggested that Facebook should buy Skype". That reveals and erases the ice he was standing on to mourn Skype's demise at Microsoft's hands, and makes me think dimly of this Mr. Om.
@isocat @skinnylatte Signal is a perfectly good replacement for Skype!
https://signal.org/
Edit: except that it cannot call phones that do not have Signal installed (however it works on computers so you don't even need a phone to use it)
@elduvelle @skinnylatte I use Signal regularly. But: phone calls to any number?
@isocat @skinnylatte Oh.. Indeed signal doesn't do that - both people need to have signal 
It works on desktop though (so you don't actually need a phone to use it)
@skinnylatte tech “leaders” have no idea what to do unless one of the other tech “leaders” is telling them to do it. These fools think things like MS office are peak technology, they can’t imagine a different or better world. There’s no need to either, capitalism doesn’t reward innovation.
@skinnylatte I'm still mad that Microsoft killed off MSN Messenger in favor of Skype back then. MSN Messenger was the best shit ever and after it was killed off, nothing really picked up.
@skinnylatte you all know that Teams is just Skype under the hood, right?
Metastasized to all hell, but it’s Skype
@skinnylatte But hey, at least they innovated hard with the new Outlook, right? ... right?
@skinnylatte Microsoft bought Skype to cannibalize its technology for its other products. They didn't really hide it. They did very little with the service to keep it modern after they bought it.
And Teams is ok. I don't resent it, perhaps just the meetings I'm in, but the program never gave me issues.
@skinnylatte
There is no #MicrosoftTeams for #Linux. The #deb download was killed a few years back, and now teams only works in a #Chrome based browser.
At least #Skype actually worked on Linux. Sigh.
@vforberger @skinnylatte You can still get Teams from Flathub, but I haven’t tested it and don’t know how full featured it is.
@CyberSloth @vforberger @skinnylatte it has worked for me on Mint in the past 12 months.
@ownohmanny @CyberSloth @skinnylatte
Details? I had to meet with federal workers via #msteams quite a bit and the only mechanism that worked on #xubuntu was within #Vivaldi.
@Lazarus @skinnylatte Trying this #MicrosoftTeams for #Linux out. So far, I am able to log in and set up my account. #woohoo.
@vforberger @skinnylatte you can install [teams-for-linux](https://github.com/IsmaelMartinez/teams-for-linux) instead, a web-app wrapper wrote in electron.
@skinnylatte first, this OM guy is just another venture capitalist, so fuck that guy.
Also I’m not sure exactly what he’s saying with this article… Facebook should have bought Skype instead? Imagine if they had mined Skype for AI training data? This guy doesn’t have any clue what he’s talking about either.
Teams kinda sucks. Microsoft sucks. Skype also sucked. Microsoft bought Skype, then migrated those users across to teams. Microsoft used their OS monopoly to push schools and businesses into using teams, and a lot of people use teams now (even if it is against their will) so mission accomplished. What does it matter which product name Microsoft used in the end.
@skinnylatte
On linux, teams self-identified as 'skype' under audio managment apps.
Akin to facebook rebranding as meta, the parasite isn't really dead. Just a new mask/brand.