Skype, where will be in 3 more years? Who knows!!
November 18, 2019
Skype, where will be in 3 more years? Who knows!!
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Skype
We use it for business meetings to provide quotes, discuss these quotes, and perform closings. We no longer provide very simple remote support, as this feature has been deprecated. We also participate in team status meetings using audio, not video. For phone services, I used to have a foreign phone number for an overseas branch, and it was a pretty useful feature, as the local customer thought we were answering locally. Now, we don't have operations in that location.
We also perform multi-country team meetings, which expedite decisions and make them more consensual.
- Phone calls. This is the best feature Skype produces, and it has been good since inception. You can buy new numbers; you can reroute calls, you can mute, you can do three-party calls, and more.
- Foreign numbers. That is important for persons who have relatives in other countries, as they make local calls only to reach you and they don't get charged for the international calls, you are.
- Call quality. For many years, Skype has produced the best audio quality and the call stability is excellent. The VoIP competitors have a much lower stability.
- Skype for Windows takes a lot of time to load and start. Unexpectedly, a Microsoft product is so slow to start when the Windows and Skype engineers are under the same umbrella.
- Significant confusion for login credentials. Is the phone number the primary credential? Or is the login ID? Same phone number cannot be used for two logins! So, login ID is not irrelevant?
- Remote access functions have been deprecated but no indication whatsoever to where they have been ported if any. It would be very polite if Skype would say: "This functionality is now under product X."
- Product vision. On Messaging, is it a competitor of WhatsApp? On Notifications, is it a competitor of Twitter? On Phone calls, is it a future competitor of the Telephone companies? Who knows where this product will be in the next three years? I like Microsoft a lot, but here is where I suggest calling Steve Ballmer for a 30-minutes vision conversation, and you guys will be all set.
- Positive impact on all features related to Phone interaction.
- Negative for such a complex login administration, which requires an administrator to do it when using Skype for Business. WhatsApp has a much more relaxed approach for new users and groups.
- Positive impact on the audio quality makes it easy for non-native language speakers to interact with native speakers, as they can understand the utterance much better than in regular phone lines — a crispy tone of voice.
- Negative for the lack of robust tools for contact import. Importing Gmail or Yahoo or Facebook or Twitter contacts should be a mandatory feature, as Skype users, especially businesses, would benefit from the instant availability of all disperse contacts.
Skype has more solid features and more stability than Net2Phone, although Net2Phone is more focused on phone calls.
Skype is a bit behind Avaya Communicator, again because Avaya Communicator is more focused on phone calls, and Skype is everywhere.
Skype is not at the same level as Zoom, GoToMeeting, GoToTraining, and Cisco Webex. Zoom is surprisingly (a young product) ahead of all of them.
Skype is a bit behind Avaya Communicator, again because Avaya Communicator is more focused on phone calls, and Skype is everywhere.
Skype is not at the same level as Zoom, GoToMeeting, GoToTraining, and Cisco Webex. Zoom is surprisingly (a young product) ahead of all of them.
Do you think Skype delivers good value for the price?
No
Are you happy with Skype's feature set?
No
Did Skype live up to sales and marketing promises?
No
Did implementation of Skype go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Skype again?
Yes