sunbeam60

Does this belong in technology?

Exciter - when DM fell off their cliff.

Are you ok?

Yes, I’ve got a detailed plan and I’m sticking to it. In 12 years from now, my youngest will be 15 and I can start winding down. I can’t imagine doing nothing, but with some part time work I think my wife and I can stretch to make it work. Requires that the oldest self-fund through university, which I had to do, so I’m ok with that.

Currently 47, which is probably substantially older than most people here. The concept of “retirement” (winding down) seemed so far away (didn’t start saving for it until late twenties) but compounding interest really is the most powerful force in the universe.

Of course if the stock crashes, plans may have to change. I’m slowly moving towards a stronger bond mix but that lowers return and pushes dates out. It’s a hard balance.

I think I’ve accounted for everything that one can plan for; late life care costs, risk of both my wife and I living to 100 (in a financial sense, we should all be so lucky), higher spend until 75, then lowered. There’s a risk that the UK removes universal state pensions, which would drastically alter my plans.

https://imgur.com/a/MAWe4eq

Crucially though, for a very long time they forced you to choose a server instead of just set you up on the default on.

I’m not saying don’t federate. I’m saying don’t talk about that as the primary feature when you’re enticing people to sign up to it.

Agreed. There should have been a default place to sign up from the beginning. Leaning on federation as a feature is something very few people care about until they really care about it. The mass adopter just looks at where their favourite celebrity or talking head is and then move there.

I didn’t. Thanks for the shoutout, I’ll have a look.

You’re way outside my scope of knowledge - I know a bit about the decisions they took 10 years, and not very much on what is happening today. I would imagine some of these limits are configurable and dynamic. I really don’t know.

Skype made the call negotiation go through a central server (as does all systems nowadays). Skype was originally built on Kazaa technology to punch through firewalls without a central coordinator and that’s what Microsoft removed. They didn’t remove it to track the calling but to enable larger group calls on weaker devices which required video mixing on a central system rather than peer to peer call (where weaker peers couldn’t decode that many video streams). Calls up to 4 are still routed peer to peer if the backend can find routes through all firewalls.

Very very little of Skype was in the new Teams if anything. Teams was a rewrap of Communicator calling tech and was a response to Slack. The real time chatting had nothing to do with Skype either.

Skype lingered in Microsoft for a couple of reasons; Microsoft was crap at acquiring businesses back then, thinking that a hands off approach was best. It meant Skype never really became a proper Microsoft team - they still felt and acted like Skype employees and they didn’t manage to affect Redmond very well. Being acquired is super hard especially when almost all of the bigger business was in a different time zone and a different culture.

I was at a leadership development workshop with a tonne of Skype leaders about 10 years ago. They were still feeling incredibly frustrated and not understanding what was expected of them. It was a botched acquisition and the fault was on both sides.

Of all the meeting solutions, I’ve come to the conclusion that Google Meet is the least bad.

In mean aside from the fact that almost all of that story is completely wrong, it’s a good story.

Source: Used to work at Microsoft and worked a lot with people from the Skype team.