I have never dealt with anything as needlessly complex as a Microsoft account. They screwed it a decade ago, and I finally, during a 2-hour battle with passwords, phone calls, entries, re-entries, password changes and downloads, have a working copy of Skype. I am going to use it for one event. Then I am going to quietly get it off my machine and strongly resist ever agreeing to it again. Lovely if your business is being reached by people, but mine is avoiding that sort of at-their-convenience day, in which my train of thought can be blown off the tracks by a random yak or message wanting something. I have now lost a whole morning in the middle of a delicate bit because of Microsoft’s ineptitude at communication. They need a writer. Someone conversant with plain English, as in, no, not THAT code, the OTHER code, and wait, we’ll send you another one. We’re texting your landline. Did you get it yet?
Skype. Microsoft. Both on my no-no list.
by CJ | Mar 22, 2017 | Journal | 10 comments
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I let one of our staff use my office computer for an exit interview from library school; she was graduating, yay! She had to use Skype, and activated it (it was dormant on my computer, because I had never used it.) It took me 2 weeks to stop the befeathered thing from activating itself on my computer every time I booted up.
My first experience, during my son’s deployment to Kuwait, was great. Easy to access and use.
2nd experience, about 3 years later, worse.
3rd experience, about 5 years after the first go round, was just pitiful.
It’s one of the very first things I eliminate from my computers and cell phones after upgrades.
Why a company like Microsoft can’t use a simple y/n if y then routine to detect that the response in the blank is numeric, not alphabetic, that very few legitimate people are named 898-2838— and more than that, can it not recognize input in the regular pattern of a phone number, and figure that that is NOT your e-mail address? No, Microsoft can’t figure it. It blindly sends e-mails and numeric codes to your landline after asking you to input either your phone or your e-mail addy…make a choice, in an array of blanks. Well, Microsoft, that was dim.
One of my Silicon Valley friends just introduced me to an (IMO) excellent video-chat/conferencing service that’s platform-neutral: zoom.us. What you can do on a free account is quite robust, video quality (in my experience) is excellent, and it *doesn’t* natter at you: you just use it when you need it, then close the app and it goes away. And I have *never* received “upsell” emails on my free account. If you have distant relatives/colleagues & need/want to video-call, it may be worth looking at.
Personally, I use Skype as my primary work phone. For a ridiculously low price, I can call anyone, anywhere. And use a headset.
That being said, if you don’t change the defaults to kill all those notifications, it can be a royal pain. It is, however, fairly easy to disable them. And you can set yourself to invisible so that no one, not even friends, knows you’re online.
(As for the pain in setting up a new account? Oh, yeah, I hear you. But it’s mostly because they’ve had so many problems with bots creating x-rated accounts and then spamming legitimate accounts.)
Well, I think I have wrestled the beast to the ground. It is running. I very carefully unchecked every lovely feature MS tried to give it. I think it will just basically communicate once, for one hour, then gracefully demise forever. I hope. It would be lovely if I used phones. I try to avoid even those as much as possible. Keyboards are my thing. I’m not antisocial—just trying to get some writing done. Lovely invention. But we always said those Buck Rogers visiphones were going to be a real pain: you’d have to put on makeup and dress to the nines in your own living room. And we all do that, right? 😉
I gather that Skype can be really useful for face-to-face type stuff, where you actually need to be able to see both ends, or all ends, as the case may be. But I haven’t installed it on my computer, and I’d rather use emails.
(I’m sure that my nephew and his wife would use it – but they use ASL.)
It’s been a very long time since I used Skype. I tried Google+ voice/video group chat for a meeting, for a table read on an audio drama for two productions. That went OK both times, but neither was it problem-free for the group.
My experiences with Skype were good and bad. I ended up making it private to all but those who know me or I’ve approved, which makes it of no use for business, you’ll note. This was because, early on when Skype was pretty new, I got a few very explicit text messages. Uh, no, thanks. At the time, the only recourse was to block a user like that and then to prevent the general public from sending text or voice or video.
I was not impressed with the service for a long time, and then have used it only occasionally if asked, for things like the round table for groups doing audio productions. I’d be fine with any friends or business associates calling me too, of course.
(About makeup: I was very surprised to learn there’s a small community of younger guys on YouTube who wear makeup for everyday. Yes, most identify as gay or some alternative on sexual orientation or gender identity, but not all, and it appears to be mostly under-30’s all the way to young teens. So at least for them, self-expression and the societal norms about guys wearing makeup are changing. This was a big surprise to me and made me do a paradigm shift to accept (and defend) that. It takes guts to do that in today’s Western culture. But that’s what they like. It intrigued and impressed me and made me aware that’s how one segment of today’s guys like to express themselves. A tangent, but maybe interesting for people here.)
XKCD remains as ever pertinent – https://xkcd.com/1810/
I’ve had no real problems with skype, once I’d found the do not launch at start-up tickbox, (I think I needed to google this) just remembering to sign out when I’m done. I believe it doens’t play nicely with Mac users though. A group of us also use a google hangout which works well and seems to be more platform independent.
I have used Skype for work (and sometimes friends or family) for many years, so the various changes have *generally* seemed incremental, and not too painful. The changeover to MS? Ouch! Two things saved my sanity: (1) I already had a MS account and (2) someone who had already suffered through the transition was able to show me exactly what I needed to do.
The video feature is OK, but hogs bandwidth. Sharing screens hogs bandwidth to a slightly lesser degree, but is a blessing when working collaboratively. Fewer bells and whistles than GoToMeeting, which is just fine for me, and far less costly.