The Tell-Tale Skype

While all technology can be frustrating, I’ve never run into anything quite like Skype. And I think it’s time for Microsoft to stop piling on new features and actually fix this thing before it’s too late.

To be clear, I’m worried this will never be fixed. That this cannot be fixed.

See, Skype is an enigma. It is absolutely crucial and necessary, and it works well most of the time. But it also falls apart in the details, and in doing so it is also a burden, a daily annoyance that never seems to rise to the challenge of its promise.

I mean, Skype is magic, right? It’s not enough that it gives you the ability to communicate with others, for free, from all around the world. It now does automatic language translation, like the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Skype powers the seven podcast episodes I appear on each week—about 9 hours of content per week, overall—and it drives the daily conversations I have with co-workers and friends. It’s how we keep up with each, share information, and files, and reach out when we need an immediate response. Skype is clearly very central to my life. And as such, I must really appreciate it. Right?

Wrong. Skype is infuriating.

And it says something, I think, that the constant drumbeat of the frustration that Skype notifications cause is like a “Chinese water torture as a service,” as I think of it, something that is so overwhelmingly bad that I literally need to remind myself, as I have done so while writing this post, that Skype is transformative. A software miracle of sorts.

And yet I would exorcise it from my life if I could.

Perhaps a personal example will help explain.

As you may know, my son Mark is deaf. He wasn’t born that way: At just a year old, he came down with bacterial meningitis and almost died, and the potential outcomes of surviving this ordeal were deafness and/or mental retardation. Long story short, Mark received a cochlear implant at 18 months, and a second unit (on the other ear) several years later. (Had this happened today, he’d have gotten both together.) He can hear, not like you and I can hear, but well enough that you can converse with him and you’d never know the difference if it weren’t for the hearing aid-like devices on his head. He speaks clearly, sometimes hears amazingly quiet things, and the overall impact of this technology on his life, and our lives, has been nothing short of miraculous.

But when Mark was a baby, taking care of the external part of the implant, the bit that looks like a hearing aid, was, of course, problematic. It is held onto his head with a magnet, and it can fall off easily enough. So when he was a baby, there was an alarm built into the device, so that it would make a droning beeping sound, alerting his parents or others nearby that it had fallen off. He couldn’t hear it, of course, as he’s deaf. That alarm was for us.

To this day, I still hear that alarm in my nightmares, that beep beep beep beep sound that would never end until I acted on it. Here was this magical device that could help my son hear. And God, was it annoying for that first year or more. You’re doing the right thing for this child, and it should feel good. But your nerves are always on edge because of that sound. Which you would hear when it wasn’t even beeping. I still hear it sometimes.

That’s Skype.

And until Microsoft figures out a way for this service and its clients, which sit sleeping in every single device I own, to work properly, Skype will always be an annoyance.

I know what you’re thinking. But Paul, you review devices and write about technology, so you have more pain points than most people. Too, how about growing a pair and figuring out how to silence those Skype notification sounds? I mean, really.

But it’s not that simple. Skype is actually worse than I described. In fact, Skype is basically haunted from what I can tell.

On any given day, I can be sitting here in front of my desktop computer, chatting with Brad, or Rafael, or Mary Jo, or anyone. And we’re just going along, I’m getting bits of work done between the conversation points, and the day is just sort of progressing normally.

And then, suddenly, one of my devices—and seriously, it’s random, it could be my iPhone, my Pixel XL, my Elite x3, or even a sleeping PC like the Surface Book—will emit a Skype notification sound and/or vibrate. And what it is notifying me about is the most recent thing that the other person in the Skype conversation typed. Despite the fact that I already responded to it on my PC, minutes earlier. And despite the fact that this conversation has been going on for 30 minutes already. Or an hour. And that stupid device had just now woken up to alert me. For some reason.

Then, it’s like I’ve woken a hive of annoyance. A few minutes later, another device will ring, or buzz, or something. Depending on how notifications are configured, a system of options that spans both the OS itself and the Skype app, and varies on both. After a while, my office is a symphony, a cacophony, of these alert and vibration sounds. It’s my son’s beeping cochlear implant all over again. That miracle is annoying me. It’s making me a bit crazy, to be frank.

I know. It sounds like a problem I can fix. I’m telling you, it is not. It doesn’t matter how I configure Skype, it’s like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. It just finds a way.

Which brings me to two of the more recent Skype developments. Both make this situation even worse.

As you may recall, I spent this entire past year waiting for Microsoft to convert my Outlook.com account to the new version of the service. That finally happened in late September, but I may have never explained why I was looking forward to this. It’s because I use a web client for email, not an app, on my PC. And I’ve been using Google Inbox, which is just great, because at the time I came over to BWW (my parent company/employer), it was on Google Apps, and they used Google Apps, and so what the heck. But I was going to switch over to the new Outlook.com when it became available to me. I was looking forward to this.

But I can’t do it. Because of Skype.

If you open a web browser window and navigate to Outlook.com, or to OneDrive.com, or God help you to both in separate tabs, you have just created yet another place where Skype can notify and annoy you. Aside from the obvious, this is even worse than it sounds because the notification sound that Skype makes on the web is a terrible sound, both different and more annoying than the normal Skype sound.

And you cannot turn it off. There is an option in the web client, tantalizingly close to what I want, that lets you mute ringing. (YAY!) But only for a set period of time. (BOO!) You can’t actually turn it off.

This means that I cannot use the Outlook.com web interface like I want to. But it’s even worse than that, because this also means I cannot open OneDrive on the web and just leave it there, because that too will trigger these horrible Skype sounds and notifications. So I have to open OneDrive, do what I need to do, and quickly the tab. I move furtively in and out of the service like a small garden rodent, always afraid of what might happen. Thanks, Microsoft.

The second recent development is the Skype UWP app that is bundled with Windows 10. It’s currently called Skype Preview because it is not ready for prime time. And yet, there it is, a part of the version of Windows 10 that 400 million are currently using. More on that in a moment.

To give the Skype team a bit of credit, I often hear from them when I complain about their product. And after a recent tweet, or post, or whatever, about Skype, they reached out to me and asked why I said I’d never use the Skype Preview app.

Simple. I do not trust it.

Here’s how Skype Preview works. You don’t “run” the app, that’s so Windows 95. Instead, you just trust that the Skype service is running in the background. So when someone pings you on Skype—starts a conversation or whatever—a notification is supposed to appear. You click that, and the Skype Preview app will open, and off you go.

Two things. First, Skype Preview is a mobile app, and I just described how random these apps work across multiple platforms. And I have literally experienced this: I’m working on my PC and one of my phones alerts me to an incoming chat request. But there’s no notification on my PC, and because the Skype Preview UI isn’t open, I have no way to respond immediately, and I miss the call.

Second, Skype Preview kills desktop Skype. It doesn’t actually uninstall it. But if you make the mistake of opening Skype Preview while the desktop application is running, or if God forbid it wakes up on its own—as I noted, Skype is haunted—then it will just close the desktop application for you. And it will prevent that desktop application from running when your PC boots up. Thanks, Microsoft.

What these two things–Skype in Outlook.com and Skype Preview on Windows 10—have in common, by the way, is that they are both marked as Beta. You’d think that Microsoft would let you turn a beta feature off on a website like Outlook.com or OneDrive.com because, after all, you don’t inflict beta code on normal people. But nope. You can’t. They just enabled for you by default. Suck it, normal people.

Skype Preview in Windows 10 can at least be uninstalled for now. But Windows 10 doesn’t also include the superior desktop client, so you have to really know what you’re doing. It’s OK for me. But I don’t think this is the right thing to do to normal people. You experiment with beta testers, Windows Insiders, not the general public, Microsoft. You’re doing wrong by your customers in both cases.

I am tired of complaining about the same thing over and over again with Skype, and I am even more tired of people who work on this product pretending to not understand these complaints or, worse, never doing anything to fix them. I have to use Skype, so I do. And I recognize that much of what it does is indeed miraculous. But Skype is driving me slowly insane, like the narrator from Edgar Allen Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart And like that narrator, I have murder on the mind. And what I’d like to murder is Skype.

Beep beep beep beep…

NOTE: Brad wrote about his own frustrations with Skype back in August. As you can see, things have not improved.