Crucially though, for a very long time they forced you to choose a server instead of just set you up on the default on.

I’m not saying don’t federate. I’m saying don’t talk about that as the primary feature when you’re enticing people to sign up to it.

Agreed. There should have been a default place to sign up from the beginning. Leaning on federation as a feature is something very few people care about until they really care about it. The mass adopter just looks at where their favourite celebrity or talking head is and then move there.

I didn’t. Thanks for the shoutout, I’ll have a look.

You’re way outside my scope of knowledge - I know a bit about the decisions they took 10 years, and not very much on what is happening today. I would imagine some of these limits are configurable and dynamic. I really don’t know.

Skype made the call negotiation go through a central server (as does all systems nowadays). Skype was originally built on Kazaa technology to punch through firewalls without a central coordinator and that’s what Microsoft removed. They didn’t remove it to track the calling but to enable larger group calls on weaker devices which required video mixing on a central system rather than peer to peer call (where weaker peers couldn’t decode that many video streams). Calls up to 4 are still routed peer to peer if the backend can find routes through all firewalls.

Very very little of Skype was in the new Teams if anything. Teams was a rewrap of Communicator calling tech and was a response to Slack. The real time chatting had nothing to do with Skype either.

Skype lingered in Microsoft for a couple of reasons; Microsoft was crap at acquiring businesses back then, thinking that a hands off approach was best. It meant Skype never really became a proper Microsoft team - they still felt and acted like Skype employees and they didn’t manage to affect Redmond very well. Being acquired is super hard especially when almost all of the bigger business was in a different time zone and a different culture.

I was at a leadership development workshop with a tonne of Skype leaders about 10 years ago. They were still feeling incredibly frustrated and not understanding what was expected of them. It was a botched acquisition and the fault was on both sides.

Of all the meeting solutions, I’ve come to the conclusion that Google Meet is the least bad.

In mean aside from the fact that almost all of that story is completely wrong, it’s a good story.

Source: Used to work at Microsoft and worked a lot with people from the Skype team.

True, but there is good and bad ways to use media (educational content done well vs cheap Chinese children’s TV) and we do have age ratings there.

You’re right that cigarettes are universally bad (smokers would argue not, of course, and probably highlight social moments, pauses to reflect etc) but much of my list has good and bad sides. I’m perfectly open to removing cigarettes from the list, but it doesn’t change the validity of the other areas where we regulate minors’ usage.

We ban gambling, cigarettes, alcohol, media for children, because of harms we understand that they inflict on children. Should these be parental discretions too?

Got two teenagers. I’d outlaw smart phones for anyone under 18 if it was up to me. Bring the flame!