• @Lost_My_Mind
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    417 hours ago

    Wait…MICROSOFT owns skype??? Was this always the case, or did they do something stupid where they bought skype during the heyday, and immediately tank it just a few years before the pandemic? Because Zoom really had a field day in 2020.

    So, which is it? Did they always own it, or were they a buyer of an established skype that tanked it like Verizon did with tumblr? Or that other company did with myspace?

    • the_weez
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      3016 hours ago

      If I remember correctly MS bought it from eBay. And then promptly did their best job at taking a dump on it. Nothing MS did to Skype was good, disabled encryption by default, removed features, made the network so terrible that they actually make you consider teams. At one point Skype was the only game in town for personal web calls and chats, in the US at least. MS pissed that away, because killing competition and owning patents is more lucrative than creating good products and services.

      • @[email protected]
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        516 hours ago

        Also forced people to use a Microsoft account to use it, and they definitely messed something up in the migration.

      • @[email protected]
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        215 hours ago

        The biggest thing they did to kill it was banner ads in the client. The second those showed up, all my friends and myself instantly jumped to the new, fledgling Discord.

        • IndiBrony
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          614 hours ago

          Which very quickly started to add the occasional banner and constantly push nitro. It fucking sucks.

          Is there a defederated version which doesn’t constantly drop quality and connection like discord does?

    • @beerclue
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      2216 hours ago

      They’ve owned it since 2011. When they did buy it, they had Lync, which sucked pretty bad. Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.

      • @cm0002
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        816 hours ago

        Now they have Teams, probably the result of merging Lync and Skype.

        And the resulting horror show is just as bad as you’d imagine to :/