Microsoft...........

Microsoft have bought Skype and they intend to dissolve Windows Messenger early next year.

This is going to be a problem for me. With two children living abroad I have to use Skype for Canada and Windows Messsenger for America on video calls, both don't work very well in the opposite countries. I can only hope that Microsoft do something to improve their present set up.

 

Fear not, there are always many options.

Skype is pretty good now, and will get better with Microsoft's resources ploughed into it. MS wont have bought it for fun, they know that the way the trend is going, remote working and global communication are no longer novelties, they are how business work now, so you can bet it will get better.

If it doesn't, there are alternatives. There are loads of free video-chat apps about, and a few excellent paid for but very affordable ones. Have a look at Counterpath's suite of apps. We used their X-Lite app at my previous work and the quality was flawless then, and that was several revisions ago. http://www.counterpath.com/x-lite.html

 

Thanks Clueless, I'll have a look at the link later.

 

Microsoft what was free/reasonably cheap will now be very expensive, be updated every six months with a new version even more expensive, then after one year the intial version will not work at all, but there will be an updated version out by then even more expensive

Goodbye Skype you were good whilst you were around

Jack McH

 

Its not really like that any more Jack. MS had a bit of a scare a couple of years or so ago, right at the start of the latest financial crash, when new broke that a lot of government bodies were moving to open source alternatives to their products. That was on top of statistics showing that MS was losing ground in just about every aspect of computing.

Yes MS still want to make megabucks, and they do so via their corporate licensing schemes (which are just silly money), but they were clever about it. They realised that the average individual private user isn't going to pay silly money, so its either give stuff away free or cheap and keep those users hooked on MS products, in the hope that they'll develop skills in MS technologies, meaning that corporates have to use MS products if they want skilled people. The alternative was to continue losing ground to open source, and end up going the way that all great empires ultimately go.