For over a decade, my family has been using Skype to keep in touch. Weekly, we have a video call with my parents across the ocean. Whenever I travel on business, I find time “to skype” with my husband and kid from a hotel room. Many similar applications have come and gone but we stuck with Skype because it was simple and good. Or rather it used to be. Sadly, ever since it got acquired by Microsoft, each update seems to bring a useless feature while making core functionality more difficult to use. It’s now reached the boiling point where we are looking for an alternative.
Skype is not the only application that was made worse by the new corporate overlords. Actually, I can’t even think of one that got better after being acquired… Can you?
Maybe to some it’s exciting that Figma will work with video and 3D models after being bought by Adobe or that Slack is getting more integrated with Salesforce, their new corporate daddy. But as a devoted Slack user, I’m thinking: how about no? There is a great value in applications that do exactly the thing they meant to do really well, and turning them into yet another “jack of all trades, master of none” seems like murder. JP
This story was originally published in Issue 24 of The Boring Enterprise Nerdletter.
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