Microsoft Recommends All Customers Upgrade to Skype 8 With Skype 7 Set to Be Sunset in September

[pratikindia]

Microsoft ruins a great product once again. The old Skype was much better. And Facetime cannot replace it as it's not cross platform. Also Skype has land-phone and cellphone calling capabilities.

 

[mp1963]

There was absolutely no need to do anything to Skype. Version 7 is simply awesome, does exactly what I imagine the bulk of users want to do. Microsoft are the masters of ruining software, adding stuff that no-one wants or uses (just look at Office!) and introducing bugs everywhere. The least they could do is allow the customer to choose which version of Skype they want to use. We can only hope that an alternative to Skype will appear!!

 

[martyjmclean]

Skype has been **** ever since Microsoft took over. I'm glad everybody I need to video call either uses FaceTime or Instagram.

 

[jlc1978]

Microsoft ruins a great product once again. The old Skype was much better. And Facetime cannot replace it as it's not cross platform. Also Skype has land-phone and cellphone calling capabilities.

This. Skype, for me, is simply the best choice even if teh product is not that great.

I use Skype because it is cheap and works reliably to call land line and cellphones overseas, and to call home when traveling overseas. It works fine with a slow data connection for voice calls; wether it is 2G or slow wireless.

The interface is confusing at times and it is frustrating to use; but since I can reliably call and it works fine with a VPN where Skype is blocked I continue to use it.

 

[Morgenland]

I use facetime every day for hours of conversation between the US and Europe. I can't support your thesis. In principle, FaceTime works pretty well. I don't know where you live, of course. Maybe it won't work there at all, sorry.

Skype was great as in "was". The interface gets worse and worse but the calls seem stable once you are connected. Facetime seems to always get choppy no matter what the bandwith is after a few minutes.

 

[ruka.snow]

The recormendation for everyone to move to x is really not valid. Skype has all of my contacts, it is understood, you can get it on your phone, granny can use it, it is a verb. Suggesting dropping Skype and moving to whatever flavour of the month products are about is just not a viable suggestion, I can’t get granny on my discord server, might as well pick up the phone, phoning someone does not need a new password to remember or app.

 

[macduke]

LOL, Skype. What a waste of both Microsoft's money and what was once a great service.

I'm trying to think of the last time a big tech company bought another big tech company and it turned out well. I'd say Beats has been okay but it's mostly because Beats was mostly marketing with sound that wasn't as good and that has improved over the years. But I wouldn't say it was wildly successful or anything. But even thinking about bigger tech companies gobbling up smaller tech startups—it often ends in the service being shut down and a lot of users left in the lurch trying to pick up the pieces and figure out what to do next while the big tech company retains some employees and intellectual property that they can leverage for something completely different.

 

[nassi]

Whether this release is news or not, Skype is still REALLY terrible.

Thanks for wrecking what was once a great product, MS!

[doublepost=1533753146][/doublepost]I have disabled Skype's "Always keep Skype up to date" in Preferences->General. I really hope they don't discontinue 7.59, which is the latest version that works in a reasonable version on the Mac. If they do, I'll have to cancel my Skype subscription which I'd rather not do, because my Skype phone number is one of my advertised business numbers. It's not like there aren't competitive services out there. Skype 8.x is just soooooo bad. Truly unbelievable.