• baatliwala@lemmy.worldOP
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    2 months ago

    Amazing how Skype went from a verb to the shadow realm. MS could’ve done so much more.

    • the_weez@midwest.social
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      2 months ago

      Word on the street is that MS couldn’t harvest the data they wanted out of Skype, even after turning off the encryption. So they let the Skype team keep on going because of reasons, while silently replacing them with teams.

    • frunch@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Would seem almost intentional given the size and success of the company. How do you fuck something like that up so badly? Seems like one of those Embrace, Extend, Extinguish deals or similar

      • IsThisAnAI@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        Skype was always shit. It was being first to market that made it popular. It was one of the first ways to get cheaper and free informational calling. By the time MS purchased it vent and ts became popular as well as zoom and others entering the space.

        • warbond@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          I agree with you here. They just never kept up with what people wanted or needed out of a communications platform. When Discord showed it was more versatile nearly 10 years ago, my whole group switched and never looked back.

          Skype call sounds still bring specific kinds of nostalgia though.

  • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Immigration Canada: “Prove to us that your marriage is genuine. Prove that it wasn’t for immigration purposes.”

    My wife and I: “You sure you want that?”

    Immigration Canada: “Make with the proof.”

    My wife and I: 400 pages, front and back, of Skype call logs/timestamps. A fucking literal ream of paper

  • Mad_Punda@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    I’ve been using Skype for cheaper international calls to family that still relies on phones instead of video calls etc. I’ll need to check what happens with my credit. Any recommendations for an alternative?

    • ECB@feddit.org
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      2 months ago

      I only have to use this occasionally, but on my android I use the app “Talkatone” to make free calls to phones. They have paid plans to keep your number, but I tend to just use new ones whenever one expires.

      It might not suit your needs, but it’s worked pretty reliably for me for the past 10 years or so.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      2 months ago

      Google Voice is good. I use it to call from the USA to Australia which is only $0.01/minute and doesn’t have any monthly fees. You can see the rates here: https://voice.google.com/rates

      I’ve got an Android phone and you can configure Google Voice so that it’s automatically used whenever you make an international call from your phone’s regular dialer.

    • 🔍🦘🛎@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It’s a little contentious, but Discord is a solid video chat app. It’s good for hop in/hop out for multiple users and you can have a dedicated family chat room on the server too. Very device compatible and resource friendly, and totally free.

    • Dettweiler@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      I’m not a fan of Meta, but all of my international family rely heavily on WhatsApp.

      It also seems that Signal supports VoIP calling, but I have not tried it.

      • Mad_Punda@feddit.org
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        2 months ago

        Well, I have family that is old enough not to manage to use WhatsApp. They have a smartphone. WhatsApp is set up. I can never reach them on it.

  • Viri4thus@feddit.org
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    2 months ago

    Ah yes, typical MS handling acquisitions. What a cancer of a company, metastasising everywhere and as much as you want to get better, it just won’t dissappear. Antitrust oversight is a joke…

    • kautau@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Well yeah “shutting down” here is more like “absorbed” into teams. They don’t make “enough” money from consumers to keep it going, but they do from their teams subscriptions. The tech is and will further be ported to teams and the branding changed.

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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    2 months 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@midwest.social
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      2 months 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.

      • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 months 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.

    • beerclue@lemmy.world
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      2 months 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.

    • gramie@lemmy.ca
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      2 months ago

      I remember a theory that the US government asked Microsoft to purchase Skype and change it from p2p to server-based, so that they could intercept decrypted communications.

      Skype was originally made by a European company (Latvian?).

    • ramenshaman@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Skype is what I usually use to video chat with them but I recently got my mom to download Signal, which is nice