That’s all.
EDIT: Thank you all for detailing your experience with, and hatred for, this miserable product. Your display of solidarity is inspiring. Now, say it with me:
Fuck Microsoft
Skype made the call negotiation go through a central server (as does all systems nowadays). Skype was originally built on Kazaa technology to punch through firewalls without a central coordinator and that’s what Microsoft removed. They didn’t remove it to track the calling but to enable larger group calls on weaker devices which required video mixing on a central system rather than peer to peer call (where weaker peers couldn’t decode that many video streams). Calls up to 4 are still routed peer to peer if the backend can find routes through all firewalls.
Very very little of Skype was in the new Teams if anything. Teams was a rewrap of Communicator calling tech and was a response to Slack. The real time chatting had nothing to do with Skype either.
Skype lingered in Microsoft for a couple of reasons; Microsoft was crap at acquiring businesses back then, thinking that a hands off approach was best. It meant Skype never really became a proper Microsoft team - they still felt and acted like Skype employees and they didn’t manage to affect Redmond very well. Being acquired is super hard especially when almost all of the bigger business was in a different time zone and a different culture.
I was at a leadership development workshop with a tonne of Skype leaders about 10 years ago. They were still feeling incredibly frustrated and not understanding what was expected of them. It was a botched acquisition and the fault was on both sides.
So Teams calls of 1-4 people can send traffic direct peer-to-peer if they’re on the same LAN right?
Do all calls of 5+ users stay centrally hosted on the cloud?
These are the kinds of things that MS should document and make easily available for IT and firewall admins. Finding info on Teams ports wasn’t easy in my experience.
They probably used Chat-GPT which at the time…
Ok Mr Chat I need to rewrite the Skype code to look more like what we have been doing at Microsoft…
Oh my! It keeps crashing my PC, can you do a little less crash and more icons and shit?
Oh, it crashed my PC once more. How about this time no crash?
Dude, I said no crash! But nice graphics! Can you make the people icons at least 25% of the total screen real estate? And can you also hide the full screen icon into at least half an hour of clicks? Yeah make it real hidden!
Fantastic work on the full screen thing! Could you not make it like anything Microsoft has made before up to the point where it can actually run?
Good job at sending all my information to random strangers! Many points for that! And the icons! Soo big and beautiful! Thanks Chat-GPT! Bill! We’re ready to release!
I’ve been using teams for 3 or 4 years before the pandemic… So maybe around 2015? I gotta Google check that. But then before it was called teams it was called Skype. I recall the thing had a shitty transition to becoming teams.
