Skype was a great piece of software until Microsoft bought the company. We have been using Skype chat and video for years; it is a very effective and efficient way of managing a company with employees located all over the country.
But once Microsoft started "fixing" it, it slowly became less reliable, with file transfers now so unreliable that we rarely use that feature anymore.
Yesterday, there a major Skype problem that affected many users. It was cleared up after a few hours, but in the meantime we tried to switch to Google chat/video. Two of us spent about twenty minutes trying to connect to each other and finally gave up--and we both have existing Google accounts. Google's minimalist interface design is so obscure that we simply could not tell if something was broken or if we were missing some hidden button somewhere.
In the office, this led to a water cooler discussion about how nothing seems to work anymore. The mad rush to connect everything to everything via "the cloud" has led to dumbing down of features, complicated log in sequences, too many userid/passwords to remember, erratic performance, and long delays because former desktop only apps now have to shove everything through the cloud.
Xkcd, as usual, identifies the mounting problem in one simple graphic.