Comment by pentae
8 years ago
Skype wasn't ruined because they attempted to merge it into their other platforms. Skype was just flat out ruined with bloat, horribly inefficient code, turning it into a spying tool and not listening to their vocal users. Everyone was rioting after every update and it just got worse. To add insult to injury the last major update they have tried turning it into Snapchat. Their incompetence knows no bounds. If you think the same middle managers that ruined Skype aren't there anymore, you don't know how big companies like Microsoft work.
The client was mismanaged, but forcing the backend onto their abysmal Lync stack did ruin reliability as well as privacy.
I wonder if pre-acquisition Skype was one of the hardest software the Windows team had to deal with. For example, at one point they used SYSENTER directly to make system calls!
Do you have a source for this? I enjoy reading about horrible software.
For SYSENTER: https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/1710
Another example: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=27
This is just what is public.
Source? Skype was always quite cross platform imho.