Comment by gregdoesit
10 years ago
From my experience the same (often random) reason that makes a company succeeds, then becomes their DNA, and finally can make them fail.
I saw this happen with Skype where I worked a couple of years. The company succeeded because of P2P: we grew with little infrastructure to reach 200M+ people. P2P became our DNA, rooted deep within (almost) every core component.
Then came the new wave of mobile messaging apps. We reacted... with a P2P messaging solution. It was obvious this wasn't working - you sent a message to someone from Skype for iPhone, and they got it... sometime.
We knew to have a chance against Whatsapp and other messaging apps we needed server based messaging, so we built it.
It took 3 years. Yes, it took this long to get rid of the P2P code from just the messaging components from the 20+ Skype products - we had 1,000+ engineers and 50+ internal teams by the end which significantly slowed things down. When we were done and popped the champagne - no one really cared.
And yes, the source code is still full of P2P references and workarounds to this date.
Not to mention, in the process they more or less broke the core functionality of Skype: video and audio conferencing. Skype is so bad it's difficult to believe it's not some sort of a practical joke.
I use Skype all the time. Occasionally it would work badly, which would cause to try something else (Hangouts, the apple facechat thing, facebook, some generic flavour of WebRTC). That something else would work much worse than skype under those network conditions.
I haven't experienced anything better, even if Skype obviously could be even better. With 300 mbit connections you would think we'd have somethin better.
Sococo had a product that worked much better than Skype! It was favored by enterprise organizations, so not a lot of coverage here.
I agree that Skype works pretty well, but it would be interesting to try and reproduce the network conditions you're describing.
I'm working with a "generic flavour of WebRTC" and they're still behind Skype and Hangouts, but they're getting better by leaps and bounds.
How do you mean? I've used Skype video calling at least a few times a week for the past ~5 years, and it's generally worked very well? Definitely well enough that it's never occurred to me to shop around.
(Skype IM is a joke, I agree)
The UI is an abomination, I have great difficulty doing anything. But as far video conferencing, in my experience the video and audio is grainy and brutal, you can call the very same person using Facetime and it is crystal clear. And when there is a temporary drop in bandwidth (I assume that is the cause), rather than dropping the high-bandwidth video resolution slightly, it seems to cut the low-bandwidth audio completely.
I'm not GP, but the few handful of times I've Skyped to other countries the experience has varied from kind-of-ok to horrible.
Maybe it's a location thing? I'm in Scandinavia..
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>> "...Skype is so bad..."
Dude you should try Hipchat video conferencing, it makes Skype look like the future.
We used to have MSN messenger, microsoft killed it in favor of skype. Skype has been always awful for instant messaging. I don't remember I have ever used a skype client without some annoying bug.
Beside skype has terrible ui on Windows, current version has a bug causes wrong message ordering.
On android, I have experienced all those message delivery/notification bugs and it works slow.
I don't know how the experience is like in IOS and MacOs. Maybe I should all switch to Apple to have the best experience from a microsoft product?
Skype used to be great (this predates the MS switchover). They were the first major messaging network to get the multi-client use case right (i.e. sign in from your home desktop, your work desktop, and your phone at the same time - under skype this will just work).
Sadly the increasingly forced updates always made the UI/UX worse, the phone client was a resource hog, and they weren't quick enough with a user-friendly web client. Meanwhile Slack showed us all how it's done.
I'm genuinely trying to get my friends to switch to AIM - as far as I can tell that's the free option that comes closest to getting it right.
I'm going to have to strongly disagree that "slack showed us all how it's done." Trust me when I say, I am being forced to use Slack on a daily basis and I want nothing more for it to crash and burn.
Give me MSN Messenger and IRC again -- you know things that actually worked.
Slack on desktop is a resource hog. And connection hog.
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>Skype used to be great (this predates the MS switchover).
It predates being bought by ebay too.
I believe Skype actually uses the former MSN Messenger servers and protocol behind the scenes for instant messaging now. Microsoft literally ripped Skype's IM support out and replaced it with MSN's.
Honestly, the Mac client had always been the best client for Skype and the Windows desktop by far and away the worst but as of Kate's bugs are creeping into both.
That's interesting. In our company the Mac users were always complaining about the app quality, while Windows users seemed to be rather happy, until all the ads came in at least.
No-one here uses Skype any more though. It's all Flowdock for messaging and Hangouts for conferencing.
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Why was it hard to deliver messages to iphone using p2p? I mean I guess they couldn't open ports and listen for messages, but that should have been true for plenty of NATed systems too right?
The problem was the avalibity when the sender was offline. You send a message from your iPhone to your friend who has an Android. Your friend doesn't have reception, and after sending the message you kill Skype b/c of the battery drain (otherwise it is being part of the p2p network).
Your friend now gets reception and will get your message... between a minute and a couple of hours. Most likely when you turn your phone back on, as the p2p network was not designed to store and propagate offline messages.
Meanwhile someone at Whatsapp built a key value pair on a server and if you had reception, you got the messages immediately and reliably. Oh, yeah, because the read and unread message states in Skype also propagated via the p2p network and also got took a while to arrive...
I'm really surprised that Skype didn't just build a separate system for mobile. It seems even a simple evaluation of the facts (needing hundreds of engineers to alter an already stable product) pushes things more to the server side than the P2P side.
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Guessing it was because both phones need to have the app open at the same time. Skype's main p2p tech was built for the real-time synchronous chat use-case (like AIM), as opposed to the chat-log in the cloud use-case (like Slack).
Exactly. In hindsight we should have just built a separate messaging layer with a server backend like everyone else was doing.
However Skype had no history of running servers. Just keeping the login servers up and running (a handful of them) was enough of a challenge.
Plus when the company's success and revenue was driven by the P2P team and they said the same layer will work for messages... there was no one strong enough to argue.
And when it was obvious that Skype messaging was sub par, the company just went in denial. "We aren't really competing with Whatsapp, because they don't do video" got us another year or two of not doing too much about the root cause.
It was after the Microsoft aquisition when some MS architects told the engineers upfront that p2p and realtime messaging - forget about it.
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We used Skype IM for a long time (inertia). It wasn't just the iPhone. Skype message delivery was erratic on all platforms. It got better, but even now there are occasional delivery delays when I chat with someone who hasn't switched over (we use Slack now).
Yes, there are still traces of the p2p code. Most of messaging has been migrated to server based back ends, but there are still some hybrid solutions in place.
Funny thing the company DNA, P2P is still haunting Skype.
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Your is a perfect example of the original posting and the comment you are replying to. People have such a hard time acknowledging what they don't know.
In hindsight it was a really bizarre decision to deliver tiny time critical messages via p2p in the first place. I guess because it "made sense" because you had no scalable server infrastructure in the early years, and because the main thing was voice anyway...
"Having got on well by adopting a certain line of conduct, it is impossible to persuade men that they can get on well by acting otherwise. It thus comes about that a man's fortune changes, when his circumstances change but he does not." Niccolò Machiavelli
Going off the tangent a bit but: did the original article actually talk about WhatsApp in the context of "going up/going down the stack"? Or, did it just appear in one of the subtitles?