Skype owned video/voice chat when they bought them for 8.5B. A year into a pandemic with people using video chat more than ever and it’s barely and also ran.
One could debate how much of the Skype tech/workforce is in/on Teams though.
It’s scary (from a user perspective) if anyone buys it. At least with Microsoft they don’t really have to monetise it directly, if they just fold it into Xbox. Beyond filling it with ads for Game Pass of course.
That’s very much our experience with Teams too. It is used throughout the company for all meetings and it just works. Small meetings, larger ones (up to 20 people at a time in our company. we don’t have all hands meetings), screen sharing, spotlights, task prioritisation, special chat channels to handle developer communications on work in our development branches, … It all works nicely.
It didn’t use to work reliably 1 year ago. But the program has been iterated on continuously and is in a much better place nowadays.
I’m somewhere in the middle. It’s definitely had issues with sharing files at times, but on the meeting side it’s been as good if not better than the alternatives, and the integrations are extremely useful. It is a bit annoying how it relies on Sharepoint, and it’s ridiculous how long it took them to allow private channels, but otherwise I have few complaints, most of which are just UI idiosyncracies.
Reading Nesrie’s post, I have also seen the “broken image” issue a few times in the past, but not recently. We don’t really share any other files through Teams, so not sure how that would work.
Microsoft seems a okay caretaker. Is only when they try to integrate everythign with everything things lost course because the Microsoft ecosystem is a disaster designed for megacorporations.
If they are looking into that, I think Slack would be a better candidate, since Slack is Discord for Programmers.
Skype was also Ballmer. But I’ve read people explain Skype also happened in a weird transitional era toward smartphones, and MS really dropped the ball there. And by the time MS sorted it all out, Skype had fallen behind.
Also, Ballmer.
But there is supposedly a lot of Skype technology in Teams.
Me and discord have a love-hate relationship. The voice works great. However the racing sim group I’m with moved from a forum based communication platform to discord, and frankly keeping up with the streams of “stream of consciousness” chat to find the key information is terrible. I understand this was a community decision problem, but it points out a weakness in Discord as it moves away from gamers chatting.
Plus, how do they make $10B on it?
Same way they made $8 billion from Skype.
They don’t.
I have no memory of that at all. What was it called?
This was late aughts
Holy crap, I was working at MS during that time and I don’t even remember that.
Yeah, I have no memory of that!
I do remember the site, but I had forgotten the name.
Yeah, like I said. It had no chance.
I remember MSN as an attempted AOL competitor, that existed, but a subsection within their later MSN website to upload video, wow, that’s esoteric knowledge.
MSN morphed into a Yahoo competitor. Hell, it still exists.
Also, Soapbox seems like a terrible brand name for a video sharing site.
There are a lot of geriatrics who set their homepage to msn.com 20 years ago and left it there. That’s got to be the bulk of their revenue. Yahoo too, for that matter.
I remember the first iteration of the AOL-competitor MSN, thinking it was neat how each minisite had its own little window. It came with windows 95.
I think IE defaulted to MSN as homepage.
Yeah, and they just never switched.
Anyone doing that was probably in their 60s twenty years ago so they won’t be around much longer, and those ancient portal homepages will disappear when they do.
MSN congregates news from other sites without paywall. It’s like Google News except it doesn’t force you to each site and aforementioned paywalls.
I don’t recall Soapbox at all either. Then again it took me years before I cared much about YouTube.