[bostik]

If Skype had remained as useful and easy to use as it was >10 years ago, Zoom would

A) probably never have picked up steam, and

B) had a much steeper uphill battle

Before the plague hit only startups really used Zoom. The corporate video call space was dominated by things like Webex (awful), BlueJeans (awful), whatever MS morphed into current Teams (only slightly less awful), or if you were lucky, Google Hangouts (also just slightly less awful). Skype wasn't even a contender, and even against the kind of all-star field I just listed, it was a shitty experience - which says a lot.

There was a big void for real-time video business conferencing that "just worked", but until early 2020, the space was cornered off by giants who saw it, at best, as barren ground. Enter global, mandatory remote working and all of a sudden the existing players had nothing to offer. The market had stagnated, and beancounters had driven out all expensive innovation. All of a sudden, the space blows up and the neglected main tech in use is no longer fit for the new purpose.

Zoom has a lot of problems, but what they did have was a product that "just worked" in almost any setup, coupled with architecture and infrastructure that at least COULD respond to insane, long-lasting spike in demand.

Skype had become a rotting corpse nobody wanted to look or smell, but that was too heavy to move and too putrid to touch. We needed big enough a fire to burn it to ashes to make space for someone less atrocious. Zoom just happened to catch the tailwind, mostly because all the existing players had also abandoned the space but would not dare to leave it unguarded.

[ForHackernews]

Is Skype that bad? Every time I've used it (rarely) over the last 10 years, it's worked pretty well for me.

[rsj_hn]

I've used google hangouts and then Meets at my work and it's fine. It does not require any special training to use, it works as you'd expect, and basically gets out of your way.

I've used Zoom for online classes (as a student) and don't see any difference or advantage between it and Meets. You still click a link and and a window open ups, your camera turns on, there is a chat box, etc.

[bostik]

I use Zoom and Meet daily too. They are both functional on the bare-bones level but fail miserably with anything more complex - such as a 10+ person meeting. Or screen sharing.

Meets craps its UI dimensions when you open chat. Zoom pops the chat window up in the middle of the screen, which is only slightly less bad. Both have problems if you have detachable video camera(s) in addition to laptop's own. And don't get me started on the audio path: even if you do manage to pick the right input and output, there's no guarantee the audio actually gets routed through. Expect to restart the video call software 25% of the time and pray it reconnects the streams all the way through.

Oh, and Zoom's screen sharing experience on multi-monitor OSX setup is unforgivable. When you choose to share a screen, it triggers a sequence where the audience sees your shared view but you do not. The window you chose to share gets hidden locally.

Whoever thought that would be an acceptable user experience needs to have their head examined. Possibly with a trepanner.

[gota]

Zoom allows annotation and drawing on top of a shared screen - actual shared screen, not a separate "whiteboard"

This means I can circle a word or append a box to a diagram on a pdf my colleague is screensharing with me.

I can have non-technical meetings on whatever.

But annotation over shared screens is 100% the feature that keeps me on Zoom for all tech work

[KronisLV]

> Skype had become a rotting corpse nobody wanted to look or smell, but that was too heavy to move and too putrid to touch. We needed big enough a fire to burn it to ashes to make space for someone less atrocious.

This upsets me greatly. I recall downloading the old versions of Skype a few years ago from http://www.oldversion.com/windows/skype/ and they were actually nice to use, felt responsive and just generally were most of what i'm looking for in a chat application.

At work, we still use the current versions of regular Skype (not Skype for business, which i'm told is a separate product and disgusting) for stand up calls and some meetings, as well as a chat solution for talking with colleagues, since Slack and Teams chats are too fragmented. It would have been nice to centralize everything on a single self-hosted platform, about which i wrote on my blog: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/lets-run-our-own-chat-plat... but until something like that would happen, Skype is the closest thing we've got (apart from e-mail, ugh).

I also used Skype throughout my university days to chat with my friends, and even all the way back in school, to keep in touch with people. Now, Skype has largely been displaced by Discord or WhatsApp for those purposes (no one seems to care for Telegram or Signal) and there are very few cases when anyone will turn to using Skype anymore.

And somehow, the product is way worse today than it used to be. The UI feels more "app-like" at the expense of being confusing and slow, there are occasionally bugs with how text shows up, it's spiraled downwards far from where the original native apps were and it seems that Microsoft will continuously throw the whole platform under the bus in favor of Teams.

But neither Teams, nor Zoom are good either! The sharing UI just jumps all over the place and in zoom even forces full screen. Zoom is obnoxious and doesn't let you open the options menu without being signed in, whereas Teams is broken and doesn't let you share files directly (neither does Zoom, to be honest). They just feel like a huge step backwards for general purpose communication, instead being meant just for meetings.

So what's left? Discord, Slack and even Rocket.Chat (which i mentioned in that blog post) all have their idiosyncrasies, for example, you can't really use Discord if all you need is one group or meeting, since it's centered around the concept of servers. I really don't know how we went from something that's good enough to a plethora of mediocre and sub par solutions...