Skype, Get Your Shit Together

Skype is part of TechCrunch’s newsroom workflow. It’s the standard way that individual authors converse, share, collaborate and the like. We use other software to work as a team, but for one-on-one chats, Skype is our jam.
The downside is that it just doesn’t work very well. It’s become a running joke in the office: Skype’d it to you — So, you’ll get it tomorrow?
What is wrong with Skype? It can’t sync messages properly across devices, so god forbid if you use Skype on a Mac at work and a PC at home. File transfer remains ungodly slow. Messages often do not show up for some time on the machines of recipients, leading to confusion and, occasionally, bruised egos. And then there are Skype group chats that some of us can’t get into until the next day.
To quote my colleague Ryan Lawler, Skype “had one job!” — messaging — and it “can’t even do that right.”
And instead of getting better, it’s getting worse. At least in our office. A sampling of our public conversations about Skype: