Skype

Skype has always been an easy way to get in contact with friends, family, and even coworkers. I have been using it for roughly five years and have a lot of experience with using it on a lot of platforms. A lot of people use it and it becomes easy to add people since they usually already have it. In comparison to other platforms, a lot of people use Skype.

Skype suffers from a variety of issues: 1) The advertising. It is unwarranted and quite annoying. I know most of my friends and myself included have added entries to their hosts file in order to block ads from appearing inside of the client. Prior to the Microsoft acquisition, this was not an issue we had to worry about. 2) If you're not using Skype on a Windows computer, you're not receiving the definitive Skype experience. By that, I mean Microsoft takes a lot of steps towards ensuring that other platforms underperform with their software. The Linux client has recently entirely stopped working for a large audience. The Android client itself has some major issues and sometimes doesn't sync activities correctly with the other clients. In addition, there are some features that one would expect to work that don't. You cannot press the enter key on a bluetooth keyboard to submit a post. It's a disaster. 3) Microsoft has inconsistently changed features across different clients and have also added features that do not work properly across different clients. Emojis, for instance, may appear inconsistent between platforms from time to time. 4) Microsoft is inconsistent with their policies and will actually ban users for using the product correctly. I have a friend who was removed because Microsoft determined they were using their account for business purposes, but the only thing the friend used the account for was to communicate with his team-mates in a game he was playing. 5) The worst part is getting support for any of the features, especially as a customer. If you're paying money to Skype, you really won't get much better assistance in regards to solving issues or finding out why your subscription is not working despite it being active.

Skype has a long history as an online VoIP platform and it is quite unfortunate that Microsoft acquired it and have managed to change it. Looking at the right hand side as I write the review, there is an article entitled "Skype for Linux Reportedly Facing Issues, Microsoft Accused of Neglecting OS". This is the future of Skype. Unfortunately, this means the platform will be going to way of their infamous MSN Chats and more users will be moving away from the platform towards platforms that consistently perform across a number of devices. Microsoft is playing devices with their own platforms and environment and specifically trying to prevent others from using the software hoping they will just go ahead and make an investment in the platform. I am not going to specifically buy a certain table to be able to use Skype; I am going to continue using my Android tablet and I will remove Skype from my normal communications if that becomes an issue. Google Talk among other providers have this mastered at this point; there is no point to remain on Skype. Even services like Slack absolutely crush Skype in terms of group messaging.