From the title
I thought this was going to be another list of MS outages!
In a week that saw developer goodness aplenty in Connect(); and Microsoft face a Chromium future, there were some other adventures in Redmond you may have missed. Skype goes Away and makes its home in the System Tray Microsoft continued to make good on its promise to keep closing the gaps between the much-beloved (at least, …
This is how bad the development cycle has become for Skype: it is now newsworthy that MS is merely restoring functionality to Skype 8 that already existed in Skype 7 (and in many cases Skype 6, 5, ... and so on).
The features and options in Skype 7 didn't just blow in on the wind as spores and start growing on the code. No, each one was the result of a user requirement that survived triage, design, development, testing, and deployment.
To casually toss them aside in the "upgrade" to Skype 8 is to disregard the users being served by those requirements. For months people ignored the state of Skype 8 because they could continue using Skype 7, and they probably assumed that Skype 7 would be kept around until Skype 8 met parity.
We wrongly presumed that this was the minimum possible level of functionality.
Now Skype 7 is being retired in waves, people are being forced to use Skype 8 and they don't like what they see. And although MS is making an effort, it's not at the priority it should be.
Many users are locked in to Skype by network effects. But if sufficient users abandon the platform, those same network effects can work against you very quickly indeed. Just ask MySpace.
This post has been deleted by its author
This post has been deleted by its author
It's officially no longer supported since 1 November, and they are shutting people down in "waves" and forcing them to "upgrade" to Skype 8. So Skype 7 will continue to work for a while, but how long a while is depends on the whims of Microsoft and which wave they assign you to. It could be switched off in 5 minutes, 5 days or 5 months - we have no idea.
… the size of a phone - even a biggish one.
Make sure the 'skin' makes it as much as possible like WinPhone, including a good, I mean GOOD, camera.
Add folding, add running 'real' PC Apps by ARM emulation if you wanna.
Make it thick, make it heavy, just MAKE it! Soon, my 950 is like good for another year, tops.
And yes, you may call it a Surface phone - it will have surfaces after all.
I remember asking a chap living in Beijing on Skype whether the smog was bad there at that moment because I was travelling there in a week. Less than 2 minutes after in an unrelated web browser window I was shown a context ad touting cheap flights from London to Beijing. For the month of my travel.
So with subtitles, now I don't even have to type to receive useful personalized ads? Wow. sounds like a great deal!
/sarcasm off