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Microsoft closes Skype offices across London. Is this Skype dying?

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Microsoft is closing the London office that was home to part of its Skype development, causing the loss of 220 jobs. A further 300 people are losing their jobs in Redmond as Microsoft makes cuts that were previously announced in July. In a statement, the company said:

Microsoft is consolidating offices across London, moving employees to Microsoft’s new office at Paddington. As part of this effort, Microsoft reviewed some London-based roles and made the decision to unify some engineering positions, potentially putting at risk a number of globally focused Skype and Yammer roles. We are deeply committed to doing everything we can to help those impacted through this process. Microsoft will be entering into a consultation process and offer new opportunities, where possible.

I personally use Skype for 8 years now and the moment Microsoft got their hands on it, it all went down... Annoying bugs continuously appearing. Questionable design changes left and right. Drastic performance decrease, specially with the calling system (not even video calls). Removal of essential smileys and creation of unreasonable smiley codes :)3 get's a cat while it's a cat face, :^) is apparently someone questioning something). And none the less their attempts to make it more business like which has backfire imo.

They're loosing people to other chat platforms left and right (WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Discord). So here is me wondering if this is the beginning of the end of the Skype Era here?

This shouldn't be a debate thread, I just wanted to give a heads up and I'm interested in you guys opinion.
 
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My company uses Skype For Business ( approx. 27 000 employees ) and I've not had any issues with it myself, nor heard about any problems internally.
We also use Yammer and OneDrive without major hassles.

Perhaps Microsoft is more focused on the Business version and are neglecting the Standard version as a result?
 
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My company uses Skype For Business ( approx. 27 000 employees ) and I've not had any issues with it myself, nor heard about any problems internally.
We also use Yammer and OneDrive without major hassles.

Perhaps Microsoft is more focused on the Business version and are neglecting the Standard version as a result?

Which leaves the question whether they also neglect consumer Windows OS'es and focus on business versions more? And neither did I have any issues with Skype aside with Performance going up and down with each update, and on Android it's absolutely terrible. It eats your data for apparently nothing, and the performance is bellow any APP that I have ever tried even on a high end phone.
 
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Which leaves the question whether they also neglect consumer Windows OS'es and focus on business versions more? And neither did I have any issues with Skype aside with Performance going up and down with each update, and on Android it's absolutely terrible. It eats your data for apparently nothing, and the performance is bellow any APP that I have ever tried even on a high end phone.

From my personal experience businesses do get some major benefits from Microsoft (along with other companies) to the point when some of their key products are almost free. The way I see it Microsoft's business to business is on the rise, but their business to individual person is steadily decreasing. A prime example is many people moving from Skype to Discord.
 
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That really sounds like Microsoft wanted to buy a well running chat platform that they can distribute under their name / software suite, after failing with their own attempts (Lync (which later became Skype for Business), Windows Live Messenger).

However for the none-business Skype app (be it Android, Desktop, IOS) I've only experienced and heard an ongoing death of the app ever since MS bought it. This might not be the case for the business version! But the personal version... like where do I start... After the first updates coming from MS the resource use exploded (dead locks on threads, memory leakage) while the design looked arguably more modern and a few business concepts were implemented at the cost of performance and usability (my opinion). And ofc there were a ton of other bugs (ppl could crash your skype by sending the text "http://:", the selection feature stopped working, after a few hours it needed exponentially more time to respond to a simple click on anything, ..). Ofc most of these annoying bugs were fixed (after weeks or months), but the app still feels broken inside and the bugs made a lot of users move away (primarily to Discord).

I'll wait for the day where they require you to setup a payed MS account to be able to use it.
 
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My company uses Skype For Business ( approx. 27 000 employees ) and I've not had any issues with it myself, nor heard about any problems internally.
We also use Yammer and OneDrive without major hassles.

Perhaps Microsoft is more focused on the Business version and are neglecting the Standard version as a result?

My company recently introduced Yammer and Onedrive. How long has your employer been using these services?

Don't you find Skype (Lync) crashes randomly - fails to load contacts?
 
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With more information being released, this is just a move to improve business. They;re keeping Skype but dedicating it to Business (Skype for Business). They're developing Skype for Life - this is going to be supported on all operating systems - including Ubuntu (Linux variants).

 
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