Skype for Business 4+

I find Skype for business ok if you just use it for voice and perhaps video. It is very difficult to get all the info needed on one screen e.g. list of names of who is on the call. Video lags a bit and can be pixellated sometimes but this could be my broadband. I find the menu of in call options very poor and my team and I have given up using the function where everyone can view documents as not everyone could see them, it wouldn't work every time and crashed.

Audio / Video conferencing is a crucial tool in my day to day work. Skype for Business Online (not public Skype) is a rebrand of an old and unstable product called Lync. My experience is that it does not handle Internet connection well and even in a corporate network, if there is bandwidth contention it drops calls regularly rather than falling back gracefully. Note that if a call does not drop out the app will ask you to rate the call. However if you get regular drop outs it does not ask you to rate the call so our support teams do not know the extent of this instability. It takes a lot of bandwidth when more than a few attendees switch on video so I often see people just use audio in their meetings. Public Skype is a much better product based on new codecs and is an order of magnitude more stable. Other audio / video products such as Zoom are an order of magnitude more stable (I would go so far as to say flawless) and use less network bandwidth even when there are large numbers of concurrent video connections. I simply do not understand that when faced with that competition that Microsoft won’t take the ‘better’ codecs they have in public Skype and Teams and simply build these into Skype for Business instead of declaring end of life for Skype Online and causing unnecessary disruption and cost for millions of their customers. This is a yesteryear product.

I’m amazed, confused and very much doubt the veracity of those individuals that have given Skype anything over 1 or 2 * at best. I started using Skype when it first came out and long before Microsoft got their ruinous and destructive hands on it.
From being a superb world leading communications tool it has become an appalling, inefficient, confusing , gimmicky toy that is no longer fit for purpose.
From being a primary working tool much loved and frequently used I’ve now parked it in a misc folder where it sits waiting for someone who has no other means to communicate using a VOIP to get in touch.
As a result of the awful interference and reconfigurations inflected on it by the current Skype developers it has became virtually irrelevant and if Microsoft want to climb back up the ratings they should have the courage to reflect on what they’ve done and turn the clock back to when it was the world leader in VOIP communications.