We rolled out 'Skype for Business' and my lord is it a steaming pile of shit. Ignoring the fact that the UI is annoying, lacks basic features, fails to perform simple tasks like sending images, it's really the routing that makes loathe it.
Have the app on your phone and your desktop? Step out of the office for a minute and get a message. See the message preview in your notification and tap it. It opens the app to an empty chat because it has now completely forgotten the message and it's sitting on your desktop.
Everyone in our group got so fed up we set up a private team IRC server to route around this horrible platform.
Skype for business is the biggest dumpster fire of software that I've had to use for work in the last few years. Truly awful- resource hog, screen sharing rarely works, and frequently crashes.
skype for business is by far the worst piece of software I've used in the past 5 years
things randomly don't work (e.g. video in groups, picture whiteboards in groups), there's an inability to turn off highlights in group messages, and my machine locks up when a voice call comes in (because the skype client is using 4gb of RAM and windows has swapped it out)
only the MS group chat software comes close to being that awful, that feels like an intern's first C# app
Skype for business is shit.
It filters content. I cannot paste an error to a colleague, because it's "too large". If I first write a meaningless "Hi" instead, I can paste the text just fine.
Settings revert a lot.
It's damn slow for remote sessions. Barely usable, really. File transfers don't work most of the time (and are slow).
Phone service? Call quality is really really bad.
The mobile app (Android at least) eats battery like candy, fails to send messages and is crashing a lot.
Lync/Skype for Business is a daily pain to suffer here.
Skype is, in terms of performance, one of the worst apps (actually, currently, the worst) I have to deal with on a daily basis.
I actually upgraded my slow, old but otherwise fine android to a Nexus 5 specifically so that Skype would open in reasonable time (it was the company chat app of choice back then, and I needed to be in the loop). I preferred paying a few hundred dollars, and not wasting 30 seconds every time I needed to talk to my team. It crashes all the time, it's slow to refresh, has erratic, unpredictable behaviour that causes me to simply restart it instead of waiting when I want to check if I have new messages. When you use it alongside Whatsapp and Telegram, the difference is painful. No wonder Slack etc. are growing so fast. I'll give Skype one thing: call quality is usually alright.
Now we see all these bugs coming up for various versions, this one for Windows, the weird arabic characters for Mac, it's further proof of the codebase decay that must be going on over there. It's amazing how powerful network effects can be, that everybody is still stuck with Skype. Because everybody has Skype...
As much as I love to hate on Skype’s godawful and seemingly inexorable UX decline since the Microsoft acquisition, I have to give them credit for this latest rollback. It takes balls to admit that you were wrong on such a major redesign.
No idea what they were smoking when they decided that their target customer was Snapchat users. Skype is still relevant to me in 2018 because their core streaming tech is in my experience still more stable/reliable than Hangouts/FaceTime/Slack etc. Often Skype still connects on a crappy network when these other apps fail. This alone has made it my go-to for mission critical video chats. All I could do was cringe in embarrassment when trying to schedule business meetings and seeing those squiggles pop up all over the place.
Skype UX doesn’t need to be “fun”. It just needs to be usable. Kudos to the powers that be for making a tough call to benefit their core userbase.
Skype for Business - I really hate this shit. Random disconnects, errors, no offline message support, idiotic message history in Outlook, random errors "Text is too long" etc.
I refuse to upgrade to Skype 5 after trying it once and accidentally upgrading a second time when the app tried to auto upgrade itself. The horrid UI combined with Skype's stated desire to bring ads to the client makes me search for an alternative which sadly there isn't.
In a business setting I would say that 90% of the time Skype is used as an IM client because of its working persistant groups and functional file transfers.
Entrepreneurs take note, there's an opportunity to make a competitor to Skype even though many would say that's crazy since Skype is so entrenched. However Skype has failed to innovate and is regressing in user experience. If someone nails the group chat features first and give table stakes for the voice/video chat we'd have a viable alternate for business use.
Skype hasn’t ever (with people I know) been “beloved,” merely tolerated as the only option back when it really was, well, the only option.
Today, Skype’s voice quality is as bad as it was 15 years ago but even the cheapest alternatives from 3rd party cross-platform vendors easily put it to shame (such as voip.ms) and free offerings from the big names (Google’s Voice, WhatsApp audio, Apple’s FaceTime Audio, etc) also do the same if you’re willing to deal with network lock-in or privacy issues.
Skype video chat is basically unusable: the latency multiplier is horrendous and the video quality is at best subpar and extremelyhorriblt noisy.
The client itself is a mess. Ugly, bloated, difficult to navigate, constantly changing, buggy, and more. It’s been that way since the redesign years before MS bought them out (Skype “Classic” was the last “OK” release on that end).
We are forced to use Skype for Business at my job, and let me tell you, I have never seen a POS like that. Calls drop out for no reason, UI is unintuitive with all kinds of weird dropdowns and buttons, slow to start and just a pain to use in general. I wish we could use Slack calls instead...
Skype is pretty awful for calling phones. The user interface has become a mess and is difficult to use. They are constantly making it more difficult to call phone.
Have the app on your phone and your desktop? Step out of the office for a minute and get a message. See the message preview in your notification and tap it. It opens the app to an empty chat because it has now completely forgotten the message and it's sitting on your desktop.
Everyone in our group got so fed up we set up a private team IRC server to route around this horrible platform.
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