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Microsoft killing off the old Skype 7 for Windows .... for real this time

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31 minutes ago, Taf the Ghost said:

No, correct thread. Corporate Management is why the big projects end up like they are. While it was 7 years ago, MS paid almost 9 billion USD for Skype and, as you mentioned, it's just a staple in corporate settings. Yet, everyone agrees it's terrible, getting worse and somehow uses more system resources for the same functionality as it did 5 years ago.

 

In a properly managed company, the state Skype is in would get the entire management chain replacement. Then most of the development staff. 

Well, there is most likely a lot of truth to that, but my guess is that they are trying to cut down on development cost by going with Electron (which is cross platform).

It runs "well enough" but what really bothers me is that all these computational resources are making developers and companies really lazy. I mean, just look at the tests I posted before. Sublime uses a fraction of the resources Atom and VS Code uses, and it's much, much faster.

 

Same thing is happening to Skype. The code has gotten worse and worse over the years so even though computers are significantly faster, it still feels sluggish.

 

Now they have the chance to rewrite everything from scratch, and what do they do? They just take Chrome, create a website, bundle them together and ship it as a program. Surely Microsoft must have the resources to be able to do something better than that. I am not a fan of Chrome, and yet I have like 4 instances of it installed on my computer.

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4 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Well, there is most likely a lot of truth to that, but my guess is that they are trying to cut down on development cost by going with Electron (which is cross platform).

It runs "well enough" but what really bothers me is that all these computational resources are making developers and companies really lazy. I mean, just look at the tests I posted before. Sublime uses a fraction of the resources Atom and VS Code uses, and it's much, much faster.

 

Same thing is happening to Skype. The code has gotten worse and worse over the years so even though computers are significantly faster, it still feels sluggish.

It's management-level decisions. Though this is also one of those "burn the MBA schools down" issues. Modern MBAs get newer management far too focused on warped aspects of balance sheets, at the very real cost of future productivity and all of the little things that make a company survive. Things that are extremely hard to impossible to actually quantify for an Excel sheet are beyond far too many you'll talk to that have MBAs. 

 

To management, easier developer front-ends that allow teams to work across the globe looks great. To the end-user, the massive inability for development teams to communicate properly means you get programs that work in an extremely uneven fashion. Small-ish, high-trust teams of developers or engineers will always out produce any other approach. A good management structure can organize & integrate the work product of many of those teams into a cohesive end-product. 

 

In development/design, you almost always get what you pay for on a per-Employee basis. Which is important to remember since the entire industry is made up of people trained to think like mercenaries. (That was a choice of the companies back in the 1980s, not something the employees as an economic optimization strategy settled on.)

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I've used 8.x for a while, even though I don't use Skype as often anymore it works quite well and looks better. 

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Ha, Skype. That's nostalgic. But really, unless you HAVE to (like for your job or you wanna talk to someone who refuses to move on), who still uses Skype willingly? I mean, just a small list of things I hate off the top of my head:

 

  • Horribly bloated layout with so much wasted space. It was horrible in 2009.
  • Laggy as shit, and made my mouse flicker and games stutter.
  • Blindingly white theme with no way to change it.
  • Various call problems with quality suddenly sounding like shit or the call dropping all together.
  • Screen sharing will make your computer want to die, no matter your specs.
  • Eats WAY more RAM when idling than it should EVER need. I mean, it's just fucking sitting there, WHY SO MUCH?
  • Horribly limited features. You can DM and call people... That's about it.
  • Group text/calls were a lot dumber than they needed to be.
  • No built in players for Youtube, video/audio files or GIFs.

I could go on but why bother.

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49 minutes ago, 2Buck said:

Ha, Skype. That's nostalgic. But really, unless you HAVE to (like for your job or you wanna talk to someone who refuses to move on), who still uses Skype willingly? I mean, just a small list of things I hate off the top of my head:

 

I could go on but why bother.

To be fair, some of those things you listed are fixed. For example the new version has a dark theme. I think they have introduced bots now too. 

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1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

To be fair, some of those things you listed are fixed.

Cool, only took almost a decade. I mean, people had been begging for a dark mode since pretty much the beginning. Which outlines one of my hugest gripes with Skype (and Microsoft as a whole), they do NOT listen. They are stubborn and will push whatever they feel like.

 

And honestly, even if MS could fix every bug/issue with Skype, it still wouldn't touch Discord. Discord just does so much that Skype doesn't. They have a lot of catching up to do.

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27 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Well, there is most likely a lot of truth to that, but my guess is that they are trying to cut down on development cost by going with Electron (which is cross platform).

It runs "well enough" but what really bothers me is that all these computational resources are making developers and companies really lazy. I mean, just look at the tests I posted before. Sublime uses a fraction of the resources Atom and VS Code uses, and it's much, much faster.

 

Same thing is happening to Skype. The code has gotten worse and worse over the years so even though computers are significantly faster, it still feels sluggish.

 

Now they have the chance to rewrite everything from scratch, and what do they do? They just take Chrome, create a website, bundle them together and ship it as a program. Surely Microsoft must have the resources to be able to do something better than that. I am not a fan of Chrome, and yet I have like 4 instances of it installed on my computer.

In Microsoft's defense, a bunch of other popular apps are using Electron.

 

Spotify

Discord

UPlay

Minecraft PC Launcher

Origin uses Chromium with QT.

Steam uses Chromium with QT

Office 2019 is also Electron based as far as we know.

Atom

VS Code and vscode

 

Judge a product on its own merits AND the company that made it.

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I still miss MSN messenger, but skype can eat shit and die holy crap.

I'm happy they keep making Skype worse and worse because that will only cause it to die faster.

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completely stopped using skype when it turned into a Snapchat clone. Is it still that desperate to be like those trash social network? 

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I had to help someone a little while ago with Skype that wasn't working.  After much fussing around it turned out to be as simple as removing the broken UWP version Windows 10 seems to come bundled with and installing the old win32 one.  So they are now killing off that win32 one?  Wonderful, perhaps Skype will die off completely now.  It's grossly overdue.

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9 hours ago, NelizMastr said:

My main gripe with Skype has always been the excessive CPU usage, especially on anything other than a Windows desktop. It's been to a degree that I haven't touched Skype since 5.x (not for regular use, anyway. tested the individual versions to find the same issue).

Its amazing the difference in how well Skype runs when you upgrade from a Phenom II P920 to an N970.

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How does Skype for Business compare? Honestly it seems more like an enterprise tool than anything.

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12 minutes ago, ZacoAttaco said:

How does Skype for Business compare? Honestly it seems more like an enterprise tool than anything.

Skype for Business is totally different from regular Skype. The only thing it shares is the name and similar logo but it's based off of Lync instead of regular Skype.

 

But Microsoft is planning to kill off support for it when at some point and have Teams replace it.

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4 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I had to help someone a little while ago with Skype that wasn't working.  After much fussing around it turned out to be as simple as removing the broken UWP version Windows 10 seems to come bundled with and installing the old win32 one.  So they are now killing off that win32 one?  Wonderful, perhaps Skype will die off completely now.  It's grossly overdue.

There is a downloadable win32 version of the new version, it still sucks tho. 

 

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I genuinely don't understand how people can recommend discord over skype. Discord is missing 2 critical features that skype has: custom usernames and user search. On Skype, I can tell someone that my username is poochyenarulez and they can search and find me. On discord? I have to text or email people what my username is since it is auto-generated and I can't be bothered to remember it. They can't just search for my username either like they can on skype.

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4 hours ago, poochyena said:

I genuinely don't understand how people can recommend discord over skype. Discord is missing 2 critical features that skype has: custom usernames and user search. On Skype, I can tell someone that my username is poochyenarulez and they can search and find me. On discord? I have to text or email people what my username is since it is auto-generated and I can't be bothered to remember it. They can't just search for my username either like they can on skype.

Some would say that not being able to find them through search is a feature, not a problem.  You give out your info to those who need it rather than it being available to anyone interested.

 

Also I don't really know what you mean by custom usernames since you can change your username at any time, and you can set a nickname on a per server basis.

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13 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

In Microsoft's defense, a bunch of other popular apps are using Electron.

 

Spotify

Discord

UPlay

Minecraft PC Launcher

Origin uses Chromium with QT.

Steam uses Chromium with QT

Office 2019 is also Electron based as far as we know.

Atom 

VS Code and vscode 

Well, if you ask me it's not much of a defense. It's more "other companies have lazy developers who doesn't care about performance either".

 

It just shows how widespread the issue is.

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1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Well, if you ask me it's not much of a defense. It's more "other companies have lazy developers who doesn't care about performance either".

 

It just shows how widespread the issue is.

What development framework should they use for Cross-platform then?

 

  • Qt? But that's overpriced AF for non GPL projects
  • WxWidgets? - But it's so difficult to build on Windows
  • Java? - Everybody and their mother would bitch if a program is written in Java even if it's a well made program.

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34 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Qt? But that's overpriced AF for non GPL projects

I'm pretty sure Microsoft could afford it.

 

40 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

WxWidgets? - But it's so difficult to build on Windows 

I'm pretty sure Microsoft could figure it out.

 

40 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Java? - Everybody and their mother would bitch if a program is written in Java even if it's a well made program.

There are no well made Java programs.

 

 

I mean, it's not some small indie company we're talking about here. We're talking about Microsoft.

How about they create their own cross-platform framework? Imagine if they had done that instead of focusing on UWP. What a relief it could have been for developers.

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On 10/1/2018 at 6:31 AM, Taf the Ghost said:

No. MS can't innovate, only iterate. They've become the IBM that they replaced.

MS innovates, but not everything is immediately useful.

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1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

What development framework should they use for Cross-platform then?

 

Let me stop you right there. 

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21 minutes ago, Syntaxvgm said:

Let me stop you right there. 

Why? Do you think developers should make native apps for 3 different platforms and spend more money in the process?

Judge a product on its own merits AND the company that made it.

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52 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

There are no well made Java programs.

IntelliJ Idea and other Jetbrains products ?.

Judge a product on its own merits AND the company that made it.

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1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

There are no well made Java programs

That's a rather bold statement, there are 3.3 million apps in the Google Play store of which only one needs to be well made to invalidate it.

 

Quote

I'm not too sure how your source tested VS Code but I certainly cannot reproduce the ~20 second load time. As you can see below there is hardly a delay when opening the file and the memory usage for the 6MB XML file is around the same as the source obtained from opening a 60b C file.

 

Yes Electron is not perfect, others have proven it can be improved and it would be better if Electron programs could share certain processes such as for the GPU the overhead could be reduced but if it frees up resources as it is easier to ensure cross platform compatibility to work on more important parts of an application it is worth it.

1203067449_Peek2018-10-0215-36.gif.60eb5dc60d321205bff5adcb73bb5ddb.gif

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