Skype EECB

This is a copy/paste of an email I just sent to a number of managers etc. at Skype.

To whom it may concern,

I have used Skype for a number of years. Since version 1.2 I believe. I've always enjoyed it and while there have been a few UI changes I would have preferred not happen. There has been nothing that has made me want to uninstall and stop using your program.

Until Now.

Skype "Home" is a feature I neither have need for or want. While I understand that a lot of users will find it handy to be able to tie their list of friends on Skype to their list of friends on Facebook. I do not wish to do so. Having the feature there is fine, but please could you re-enable the ability to disable this obnoxious feature. Disabling the option to disable a feature strikes me as a bit strange and frankly smacks of a very "our way or the highway" attitude. While I can understand doing this for things like the protocol and the application itself. I do not understand it for a fringe feature that is not a core part of the application. This strikes me as a bit like Microsoft disabling the ability of users to change their homepage away from Yahoo, while it might serve some small benefit to them in the short term, long term it would drive people away from the platform.

Skype "Home" is, and probably already has, driving users away from using the Skype network.

I have found that every day at the same time, regardless of what I am doing at the time, the "Home" window (I am using the minimal interface) pops up and quite often grabs focus from what I am doing. Now while this may sound like a minor thing, I am very particular about keeping my focus on what I am working on as I suffer from Non-Verbal Learning Disorder and if I do not focus intently on what I am doing tend to get distracted very quickly. Skype "Home" is now starting to drive me to distraction so much, that every time it pops up I am getting quite annoyed and finding myself thinking more and more about uninstalling it.

I don't mind ads in the interface, plenty of other programs I run do this. I wouldn't even mind if it came up at boot (once), but please for the love of good UI design everywhere, allow those users who want to disable this particularly hernia inducing part of your program to disable it. As noted by someone in the developer section  "This idea was floated in the 5.0 beta era but was removed for 5.0 final when it was discovered that it was widely unpopular:". If it was floated and then removed, why was it subsequently re-added?

I have spent many hours researching how to disable this, there are a number of unsupported solutions involving third party software (I vet my software pretty carefully so not taking that option) as well as the suggestion to install older versions (considering this, but I like to run the latest for security and feature reasons). There was until recently a thread on the English windows section of the forum with >1000 replies asking how to disable it. This thread was subsequently locked. There have been numerous new threads started since then asking the same question.

For example:
http://community.skype.com/t5/Welcome/Skype-starts-automatically-everyday-at-4-30/td-p/162422
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Option-to-Disable-Skype-Home-Autostart/td-p/160020
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Option-to-disable-Skype-Home-Popup/td-p/163020
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Skype-steals-focus-to-show-quot-skype-home-quot/td-p/161998
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Disabling-Skype-Home-screen-on-startup/td-p/110262
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/I-WANT-TO-DISABLE-SKYPE-HOME/td-p/160022
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Disabling-Skype-Home-autostart-Vol-2/td-p/160274
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Option-to-disable-Skype-Home-Please/td-p/159636
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Disabling-Skype-Home-autostart/td-p/46260
http://community.skype.com/t5/Garage/Skype-5-5-0-110-Home-screen-displaying-on-every-startup/m-p/2280
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Need-to-stop-quot-Skype-Home-quot-from-loading/m-p/25336
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Disabling-the-Skype-Home-screen/m-p/49928
http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=698543
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/I-want-Skype-minimized-on-startup/td-p/42100
http://community.skype.com/t5/Windows/Skype-window-keeps-popping-up-randomly/td-p/30570

Also in the developer section of the site:
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3141
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3132
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3200
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3195
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3191
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3185
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3185
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3180
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3176
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3172
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3162
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3164
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3166
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3152
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3150
https://jira.skype.com/browse/SCW-3149

This is just a small sample that I have collected to try and give you some idea of the number of complaints that are being lodged about this feature. Please tell me someone in the company is taking notice of these complaints and doing something about it.

At this point I have to say I am rather disillusioned with Skype as a company and will be looking for alternatives. Please keep in mind that myself being a technical person I tend to lead other people around me as to what they should be using. While I myself am not a paying customer of Skype at the moment, my father is, my mother is, my sister is and a number of other people I know are. If I start intimating to them that I have found a better and cheaper solution to them (they are out there) then it won't be long before they move away from Skype, as I am generally the one who sets these kinds of things up for them. This will also have a knock on effect as the people who know them and use Skype to speak to them, Will start switching to other applications/systems. Consider this situation times 100, or 1000 and you will see that a small thing like this can relatively quickly start to have big effects on your bottom line.

I do hope that you will choose to listen to your users in this situation, because they are your customers. Also I can only imagine how frustrating this is in a business environment where keeping staff of Facebook is hard enough, without offering them another path to it, and throwing it up in their face at least once a day. I'm not looking for remuneration or any other form of compensation as this has cost me nothing, but I would hope some consideration would be given to a user's request when they have clearly taken this much time and effort to try and speak to someone with the ability to make decisions in the company, especially when they are in the companies long term interests.

I will be posting this to a number of websites in the hope that they will carry it, whether they do or not, I would advise not ignoring this email because as you should well know. One agitated user can create quite a lot of noise in this day and age.

Yours Sincerely,
    <redacted> "Lemming" <redacted>

P.s. My contact details if you should wish to contact me are.

<redacted>
Ph. <redacted>
Skype: <redacted>
email: <redacted>

Mailing Address:
<redacted>
<redacted>
<redacted>
<redacted>

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