Goodbye Skype

Today, Skype is officially dead, and this makes me a bit sad. And I would like to dedicate this post to its memory.

I still remember the day I started to use it. I lived too far from my parents and relatives, who were living literally on the opposite side of the Earth. I had to use international calls and pay from $1 to $3 per minute, and as you can imagine, even a few and relatively short calls per month can easily cost $100 or more. There were special dial cards, but they were cumbersome to use, and some were pretty scammy.

I tried several solutions for internet calls, including one that was supplied with Windows, but the audio quality was bad. My internet wasn’t that fast, and my parents had an even worse one. Basically, at that moment, there were only 2 choices: suffer for free or pay a lot of money for quality.

Then one friend recommended us Skype, and after that moment, our lives improved dramatically. When I called my parents, the audio quality was close to ideal because Skype was able to adjust to the connection quality automatically.

Skype not only solved the problem of me calling my parents. Sometimes I need to send a message to my wife. Like I’m leaving work. Or she may want to ask me something that is not urgent. The only way for us at that time was to call on a mobile phone or send SMS. Both cost money. Skey was free.

With Skype, I was able to stay connected to my family and relatives’ lives anywhere in the world. I was able to share photos or videos, or any other types of files.  Previously, I used ICQ and many other messengers, but all of them had many issues. Skype’s chat was very close to ideal.

Probably, I will be correct to say that Skype revolutionized the whole communication between people. It was possible to have a video call and see the people you are talking to. The ability to call and share screen or to see shared screen was invaluable. It was a truly great product, and it was free.

At one moment, we officially declared Skype as our company messenger to communicate between different employees, and it dramatically improved communication between us. Previously, to solve some problem, we had to exchange many emails or have to visit the other side. Now I can just call, ask to share the screen.

But it didn’t last long, and Microsoft bought Skype. People were imagining that with Microsoft's resources, Skype would become even better. Because there were areas where Skype wasn’t great. For example, it didn’t work well on mobile devices, and that was the time when they became more and more popular.

Skype was a pioneer in great audio and video technologies that allow to keep reliable communication over an unstable connection. This know-how allows them to be first, and they have taken the biggest chunk of the market share. According to Wiki, Skype had over 660 million users in 2010.

But even a good company like Skype cannot keep its technological advantage forever. Other companies were working hard to get similar technologies. Also, the internet became faster, and connections over half of the Earth became much more stable, so Skype’s advantage became less critical.

But even when some competitors developed products that were close to Skype in features, Skype users simply had no reason to switch. Skype was quite good, and everybody had a lot of contacts in Skype, so why would anybody switch?

But after some time, Microsoft decided to kill a product that cost them 8.5 billion dollars. They didn’t close it or anything like that. They completely rewrote Skype, and it looks like they outsourced that job to students. Quite bad students.

I’m 100% sure that I would be fired on the spot if I did such a redesign. There are not many people on Earth who can survive such a horrible product launch. But instead of restoring the old version until they fix all the issues, Microsoft decided to double down on the new version. I wrote about it quite a lot. It was simply awful and very unprofessional.

It took Microsoft around one year to get the major functionality of the product right. This was the level of quality they could release instead of the quite unstable version they did. Practically, they just beta test the new version of Skype live. A couple of more years to match almost all old product features.

Somebody may think that the new Skype does not have issues with some complex features like audio or video. But it was quite the opposite. All complex features worked quite well. Most of the issues were quite simple and I would say trivial. Like its icon didn’t show in the System Notification Area. Or main window is messed up. Basically, Microsoft released Skype with alpha to beta quality.

It was the time when the mass exodus from Skype started. Skype users got a very good reason to look at alternatives and quickly found them. Many people found that other messengers are quite good, and many of them were on par with old Skype and clearly better than the new Skype.

I clearly remember that time when I saw Skype usage decline almost every day. From many chats and calls per day, I quickly went to a couple of chats per day and a couple of calls per week. One year later, and I only have a couple of active contacts on Skype. One more year, and there was only a single contact.

Instead of Skype, Microsoft created a product called Microsoft Teams. But to me, it looks like they fired bad students and hired even worse ones. Just read this thread. It is just unacceptable for a company of that size. Let me explain what happened.

Teams has a feature to paste unformatted text from the clipboard. Most application uses Ctrl+Shift+V for this, and Teams wasn’t an exception. But people on the Teams team decided to use Ctrl+Shift+C to immediately start a voice call.

Many enterprises were using Teams because they inherently trust Microsoft, and they need a product for corporate communications, and Teams was designed exactly for that. Just imagine somebody has a group with many people. Now, some person is trying to paste some unformatted text into this group, but instead of Ctrl+Shift+V, that person accidentally pressed Ctrl+Shift+C. The keys C and V are very close on the keyboard, and it is very easy to make a mistake. I do it many times per day.

As a result, Teams will start calling a lot of people. Some people may say that it is easy to solve, just never use the Ctrl+Shift+V combination and do it some other way. But from my understanding, there was no other way.

People complained and complained, but nothing changed for 2 whole years! And the funniest thing is that they never fixed it. They just released the new version of Teams that replaced Teams Classic, and the new version doesn’t have that shortcut. The best thing they were able to do in the old version was to add a confirmation dialog! This was one of the biggest software companies in the world.

Let me repeat it. In general, Microsoft is quite good at usability and design, but this was clearly a very poor choice of a shortcut from a usability point of view, and more than 2 years later, they were not able to add a simple option to change the shortcut or at least an option to disable this combination!

If you think they learnt their lesson, then you would be wrong. Yesterday, I was using Teams and I was sharing the screen. Then, in Visual Studio, I pressed Ctrl+Shift+Space to show the parameters of the function. But instead of parameters, I was muted. Took me quite some time to realize that I was muted and to understand why Visual Studio does not show function parameters and ignores that combination.

After the call, I decided to disable that shortcut, and guess what? There is no such option! After some research, I found that there is no single option in Teams related to keyboard shortcuts. Take it or leave it.

It is beyond my understanding! It does not matter what shortcut Teams developers choose, there will always be an application that uses that shortcut. So there must be an option to allow this shortcut customization, or at least an option to disable it.

And yes, the original Skype had that option. Moreover, it was possible not only to disable it but also to customize the shortcut, if I remember correctly. Just in case this feature is trivial to implement and can be implemented within one day, including testing and documentation.

If you think that it is all, then you are wrong :D Microsoft started to push people from Skype to Teams and allowed them to log in to Teams using a Skype account. I moved to Teams and moved the only person I call on Skype to Teams.

Now that person shows up twice in Teams and twice in Skype. Moreover, on Skype, that person is named the same as I named them a long time ago, but in Teams, they are showing using Skype login name. But if I open a chat with that person, I see a third name. And I couldn’t name them differently in Teams. Just in case Microsoft owns both products, and they cannot blame someone else.

Moreover, the word “Teams” in the product name shows that the product targets teams, but Teams is missing the key feature called threads, which is absolutely critical for enterprises. I was shocked when I saw that it was not there from day 1.

Imagine you have a product that consists of a frontend and a backend. It is logical to create 2 groups named frontend and backend. If somebody has an issue with a frontend, it is logical to write to the frontend group and ask for help.

It works well when the frontend group has only a several people. But imagine you have 20 – 40 people there, and there are 3 different issues that people are discussing. Imagine all that mess when all these messages intervene.

Just as an example, imagine person A asked about problem 1. Person B responded, and you saw that person B is the right person to handle that problem. Then person C asked about problem 2, and person D responded, and again, person D is the right person.

The first problem that A and B must understand is that messages from C and D are not relevant to their issue and that they discussing their own issue. The same applies to C and D. And sometimes, C and D may also decide to help A and B. It's just a huge mess.

The second problem is that all other people regularly get notifications about all these discussions, even though they know that these issues are being handled. They have no idea if the next message is a response to the previous problem or it new problem.

Practically, they have to mute that group, or people who are discussing that problem need to create a temporary group. All of these options are quite bad because there could be a new problem, but people will miss it. And a temporary group is invisible to other people. And sometimes you need to continue the discussion later on that problem.

We are using Slack for enterprise communications, and it has a feature called threads. Let's say person A asked about problem 1 in the frontend group. Then person B responded to problem 1 in the thread to that group. Everybody got a notification about the initial message, and they can see that there is a thread and a response, but nobody except person A got a notification when person B replied. Later, person C can decide to add something to the discussion and respond in the thread. Only persons A and B will receive notification.

It is very simple and very flexible, and I would say it is a “must-have” feature. I was extremely surprised that Teams does not have it. It makes Teams pretty much useless for any big teams. But at least they recognize that, and it looks like they will add threads in the middle of 2025. Then it will take them a year or two to make it right.

In conclusion, it is really sad for me to see that good products get neglected and eventually die, but unfortunately, this is part of our lives. But in turn, it looks like there is some kind of karma, and all that direction in Microsoft is cursed after that, and perhaps it is fair.

It is time to say goodbye and uninstall Skype. Goodbye, my old friend. It is not your fault that you got into bad hands. You will stay forever in my heart as a product that made this world a better place. You were a great product that connected people over vast distances and made them a little bit closer. Rest in peace.