Sometimes we all have a gripe with something we really like. I really like Skype but there are some issues that are so blatantly obnoxious that they annoy me over and over again. This is my list. I will track to see if they ever get fixed.
- People search – what could be Skype’s ultimate value, connecting people through Search, turns out to be the most useless feature in the whole product. Here is why: with millions of people using Skype there can be many hundreds of people with the same name, even for names you would think are fairly uncommon. The only differentiation is the city associated with the account, which still can yield a hundred names. Unless you are desperate enough to send notes saying “Hi, its me, do you know me?” I haven’t been able to figure out a reasonable way of using this feature. At least half of my people searches are completely useless. Have you found a way of using People search?
- Intelligent calling with pause before extension number – a significant number of my calls are to conference calls that require one or more codes to let me in or open a call. On my cell phone I can click a number that looks like 555-555-5555,,987654321# and the phone will call the number, wait a specified time and then submit the conference code followed by “#”. Easy? Not with Skype. The only way to join a conference call with Skype is to painstakingly press each digit and the hash sign. Why, oh why? Have you figured out a way around this?
- Skype Business (I mean Skype’s business account that allows you to manage and delegate subscriptions that you reach via https://manager.skype.com – i.e. I don’t mean Skype Lync) – I’ve been a long time user of Skype Business, the forsaken child that it is almost impossible to find information about. There are many idiosyncrasies with the service however since I expect Lync to take over I am not even going into further details here. That said, I’d be very interested if there is anyone but me that have been using Skype’s business feature!