I just had a miserable experience trying to get someone to connect for an online meeting using skype for business.<p>F*K M* what stress! Why is it so? I can’t begin to understand how the vast majority of people on this planet, who are not technical, deal with this shit and waste so many human hours and sweat.
I have no inside knowledge, but just observing the business motivation. SfB is bad because Microsoft doesn’t want people to use it; they want everyone moving to Teams. They also know they have an existing installed base, mostly (probably) of large companies who have the capability of dedicating a full team of people to run it. They have already announced that SfB will no longer get updates and the on-prem software will be discontinued soon. MS is pretty much just waiting it out until all the holdouts just cave and switch to the could stuff.
Well… my favourite joke is that “Skype for business” isn’t “Skype”, and it isn’t “for business”.<p>Skype for business isn’t Skype, underneath its actually Lync the replacement for Microsoft Communicator.
And to use it, you needed the other party to install software on their computer - which can rarely be done by standard non-admin business users.<p>So adoption was really low, which mean the app just never was improved.
I had a meeting with a CIO plus team who had booked me via Skype for business. Most embarrassing call of my life. Had to dial in via shitty audio and had to send a ppt out-of-band via email. This was probably a month into the pandemic, and I got scolded for not having figured out this whole “video conferencing” by now. Seems a year later the pressures of the pandemic finally sunk Skype for business and people moved to teams, which a year ago was a also a total joke.