Microsoft why are you killing skype?
Jul 29, 2017
106 Comments
Ever since MS acquired Skype the product's been degrading. Each release:
- design gets uglier
- new bugs and regression
- another set of weird smiles
The latest iOS version looks like 1st April joke. "Highlights", "Capture" - seriously?
What's wrong with it? Is there a way people can vote to banish the product manager or whoever makes those decisions? :)
comments
I remember lots of threads in the Microsoft lounge about many tears being shed in the Skype org and profoundly horrible management running the product to the ground and then closing entire sites. All we could do is light a candle for the poor bastards. Same with Nokia.
Product Management decided that new "strategy" was to go after a younger, millennial audience by changing the information architecture (side swipe) and adding stories, their mantra, the only "vision" that they managed to convey was: "grandma is dead", by grandma they meant all Skype existing users.
Product Management also decided to move the entire code base to React native to code once and deploy on iOS and Android.
Product Management then decided that Skype needed a new branding and visual language.
These three decisions haven't been validated at all, they are so convinced that their point of view is right that they didn't listen to internal feedback, actually sidelining anybody who dared asking basic questions like: "what's the rational for getting rid of presence", answer: "WhatsApp doesn't have presence" end of the discussion.
All of these three decisions that make the three pillars of product design turned out to be wrong, disastrous actually. Infact this was called "the worse update ever".
They gave themselves a promotion just for shipping this product full of bugs, badly designed and with fewer features than the previous version. They are now scrambling trying to fix this mess but they are still not listening, they are still making decisions for which they now nothing in engineering and design (and product).
The only thing that would fix this situation would be to fire Amritansh, Eran, Danny, Punchcut (and ask for our money back), they completely lost control and trust of the organization that knew all along that this was going to happen and tried to warm them.
We all know that these guys mentioned above aren't going anywhere, not until they cash in their bonuses and stocks, then hopefully they'll be moved somewhere else, probably where Gurdeep is now.
This is Microsoft.
So problem is, why do companies hire such people to begin with, and why cant they get rid of them when there is one?