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What I find extraordinary is that Microsoft paid $8 billion for Skype only to let that brand wither and die. (I still support a Skype for Business system so I

What I find extraordinary is that Microsoft paid $8 billion for Skype only to let that brand wither and die. (I still support a Skype for Business system so I know it's not gone but it's faded from most people's consciousness). Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have been the verb that everyone used. And despite all this Teams (which isn't even particularly good) is still looking like it'll crush the competition in most enterprise environments.

brazzledazzle 3y ago
Funny thing about Skype for Business is it was a last ditch attempt to revitalize the image of Office Communicator, an absolutely terrible enterprise instant messenger service with half baked group chat functionality. Might have also had voice and video, I can't recall if they were missing that feature or if it was also half baked and terrible. They just borrowed the name from the Skype consumer product and slapped it on the newest version of Communicator. So not only was it not Skype, it was probably one of the few pieces of Microsoft enterprise software that was hated more than SharePoint (in my experience). Which is really impressive considering how much people absolutely despise SharePoint.
- SSLy 3y ago
  It was also named Lync in the mean-time, no?
  - brazzledazzle 3y ago
    Oh right, it was Office Communicator, then Lync and finally Skype for Business. And I think each somehow managed to get both worse and drop features.
- rvba 3y ago
  Microsoft had Lync, which wasnt flashy but was simply solid. Sadly it was depreciated for Skype for Business that had fewer functionalities and was just plain worse.
  - brazzledazzle 3y ago
    I don't even think it was a deprecation for a new product, just a standard version deprecation. Office Communicator became Lync and Lync became Skype for Business. They were successive major "versions" that came with rebranding and some changes in direction.
r00fus 3y ago
Microsoft paid $8B in offshore money they couldn't repatriate without paying taxes. Think of it as a way to launder a portion of that money while getting something in return.
Closi 3y ago
> Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have been the verb that everyone used. Teams instantly dominated the work world in the UK at least as soon as the pandemic hit. Pretty clear why Teams wins anyway... Assuming you want SSO in your corporation. Zoom price: £160 per year. Office 365 business standard: £123 including Office, Powerpoint, Excel, Exchange, Sharepoint... And after this change, you also have the option to just buy teams for £60 - £100 less than the Zoom price.
- esperent 3y ago
  Also, they do really good regional pricing. In Vietnam it's $36/user/year for the basic version. There's nothing else with close to similar functionality at that price and it means we can forgive a lot of clunkiness. It's less than half the price of Slack with way more features. We even get Loop knowledge management which is shaping up to be pretty great actually.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >Office 365 business standard: £123 including Office, Powerpoint, Excel, Exchange, Sharepoint... If they can squeeze ChatGPT/generative-AI functionality in there for cheap that's a slam dunk.
  - nullindividual 3y ago
    Co-Pilot is coming to Office, among other applications.
    - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
      But it costs extra, no? It's not included by default with Teams, Excel, PowePoint and the others, right?
      - nullindividual 3y ago
        Yes, that's true. $30/user/month w/o discount.
superhumanuser 3y ago
Teams uses Skype under the hood.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  Skype consumer (skype.com) has nothing to do with Teams, Skype for Business, Lync, or Office Communicator. People are getting this very confused in this thread. They shared a name for a handful of years. That's it. Teams does not share components with Skype consumer; at most they both used SILK, but Teams moved to Satin in 2021. It does use [backend] components from SfB as it is the evolution of that service.
- mort96 3y ago
  Does it? Isn't it just a WebRTC thing?
ryanjshaw 3y ago
Skype has a very, VERY small subset of Teams features. Teams is the nexus for a much broader, fully integrated ecosystem - Azure AD, Azure itself, Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, M365, Todo, etc. Anybody starting a new enterprise project in a Microsoft shop will look at building it around these technologies first. We are talking about compute, storage, front-end, back-end, integration, etc. all hosted on this stack, with Teams providing the entry point for the experience. Skype, Zoom, Slack, etc. will never compete with this vision.
- kypro 3y ago
  But why didn't they leverage the Skype brand? Wasn't this the whole point of Skype for business? Obviously the consumer product we were all once familiar with wouldn't suffice in terms of features, but I never understood why they didn't stick with the Skype brand.
  - zyx321 3y ago
    They attached the Skype brand to an unrelated product (Lync -> Skype for Business) From what I remember, the two Skypes were never fully interoperable. I guess they wanted to start fresh rather than clean up that mess and didn't want a third incompatible Skype.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    They did leverage the Skype brand, at the cost of the Lync brand people in business all knew. They made that one change because people in business all associated the brand "Lync" with a low quality product. At the time of the pandemics, they decided to push the Teams brand instead of Skype because people in business all associated the brand "Skype" with a very low quality product.
  - count 3y ago
    Possibly getting that talent to work on what became teams?
  - flakeoil 3y ago
    Skype is mainly a consumer product and that's where they have their users.
outside1234 3y ago
Teams stole a lot of ideas and talent from Skype. It is not like they just invented Teams from a cleanroom. They used the human and code assets from Skype to make Teams.
- master-lincoln 3y ago
  Can you steal ideas? I think you mean copy. When stealing something from someone, the other person does not possess it anymore. Also in this context it makes even less sense as Microsoft bought Skype before Teams existed. I think you can't you steal something you own.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  The evolution of Teams Office Communicator -> Lync -> SfB -> Teams. Skype consumer had no impact on Teams sans the name and original codec which is no longer in use by Teams. I don't know why you would make up a 'fact'.
tw04 3y ago
>Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have been the verb that everyone used. This isn't surprising at all, Skype for Business was a joke - the verb used at the time was Webex. What is shocking is how horribly Cisco bungled the entire thing. They went from market dominance (61% market share) to almost an afterthought in a matter of a year. https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/collaboration/webex-calling/wainhouse-cloud-uc-calling.pdf https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/colla...
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > This isn't surprising at all, Skype for Business was a joke - the verb used at the time was Webex. What is shocking is how horribly Cisco bungled the entire thing. They went from market dominance (61% market share) to almost an afterthought in a matter of a year. Webex was just as bad and unreliable as Skype for Business, the only reason why that shit even existed was that it integrated nicely with your existing Cisco telephony and conference room hardware. First, Zoom came in with an extremely easy to use solution right when Covid hit, and Teams sealed the fate of both by being cheap to effectively free and being even lower in barrier to entry - including the effort for compliance stuff like SSO and auditing which eventually grew more important for companies as the "it's a pandemic" excuse ceased to be viable. Personally, I do not think that there is a chance that MS Teams can be displaced any more in the enterprise space, simply because of the compliance overhead that everyone else has to do while it's considered "done" for companies that already use Office 365. And now that MS is offering VoIP integration, companies are also ditching their expensive and, let's be honest given their reputation for security issues, insecure Cisco stuff.
  - ajmurmann 3y ago
    Without a Cisco device WebEx was such a nightmare. I don't think video worked in any call I ever joined that didn't use Cisco equipment. Somehow computer audio was usually unavailable for reasons I don't understand. This was before bluetooth audio was omnipresent due to AirPods and I had to use the shit phone speakers and microphone. For me it always was the worst experience of any conferencing tool by a wide margin.

brazzledazzle 3y ago

Funny thing about Skype for Business is it was a last ditch attempt to revitalize the image of Office Communicator, an absolutely terrible enterprise instant messenger service with half baked group chat functionality. Might have also had voice and video, I can't recall if they were missing that feature or if it was also half baked and terrible. They just borrowed the name from the Skype consumer product and slapped it on the newest version of Communicator. So not only was it not Skype, it was probably one of the few pieces of Microsoft enterprise software that was hated more than SharePoint (in my experience). Which is really impressive considering how much people absolutely despise SharePoint.

SSLy 3y ago
It was also named Lync in the mean-time, no?
- brazzledazzle 3y ago
  Oh right, it was Office Communicator, then Lync and finally Skype for Business. And I think each somehow managed to get both worse and drop features.
rvba 3y ago
Microsoft had Lync, which wasnt flashy but was simply solid. Sadly it was depreciated for Skype for Business that had fewer functionalities and was just plain worse.
- brazzledazzle 3y ago
  I don't even think it was a deprecation for a new product, just a standard version deprecation. Office Communicator became Lync and Lync became Skype for Business. They were successive major "versions" that came with rebranding and some changes in direction.

r00fus 3y ago

Microsoft paid $8B in offshore money they couldn't repatriate without paying taxes. Think of it as a way to launder a portion of that money while getting something in return.

Closi 3y ago

> Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have been the verb that everyone used. Teams instantly dominated the work world in the UK at least as soon as the pandemic hit. Pretty clear why Teams wins anyway... Assuming you want SSO in your corporation. Zoom price: £160 per year. Office 365 business standard: £123 including Office, Powerpoint, Excel, Exchange, Sharepoint... And after this change, you also have the option to just buy teams for £60 - £100 less than the Zoom price.

esperent 3y ago
Also, they do really good regional pricing. In Vietnam it's $36/user/year for the basic version. There's nothing else with close to similar functionality at that price and it means we can forgive a lot of clunkiness. It's less than half the price of Slack with way more features. We even get Loop knowledge management which is shaping up to be pretty great actually.
FirmwareBurner 3y ago
>Office 365 business standard: £123 including Office, Powerpoint, Excel, Exchange, Sharepoint... If they can squeeze ChatGPT/generative-AI functionality in there for cheap that's a slam dunk.
- nullindividual 3y ago
  Co-Pilot is coming to Office, among other applications.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    But it costs extra, no? It's not included by default with Teams, Excel, PowePoint and the others, right?
    - nullindividual 3y ago
      Yes, that's true. $30/user/month w/o discount.

superhumanuser 3y ago

Teams uses Skype under the hood.

nullindividual 3y ago
Skype consumer (skype.com) has nothing to do with Teams, Skype for Business, Lync, or Office Communicator. People are getting this very confused in this thread. They shared a name for a handful of years. That's it. Teams does not share components with Skype consumer; at most they both used SILK, but Teams moved to Satin in 2021. It does use [backend] components from SfB as it is the evolution of that service.
mort96 3y ago
Does it? Isn't it just a WebRTC thing?

ryanjshaw 3y ago

Skype has a very, VERY small subset of Teams features. Teams is the nexus for a much broader, fully integrated ecosystem - Azure AD, Azure itself, Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, M365, Todo, etc. Anybody starting a new enterprise project in a Microsoft shop will look at building it around these technologies first. We are talking about compute, storage, front-end, back-end, integration, etc. all hosted on this stack, with Teams providing the entry point for the experience. Skype, Zoom, Slack, etc. will never compete with this vision.

kypro 3y ago
But why didn't they leverage the Skype brand? Wasn't this the whole point of Skype for business? Obviously the consumer product we were all once familiar with wouldn't suffice in terms of features, but I never understood why they didn't stick with the Skype brand.
- zyx321 3y ago
  They attached the Skype brand to an unrelated product (Lync -> Skype for Business) From what I remember, the two Skypes were never fully interoperable. I guess they wanted to start fresh rather than clean up that mess and didn't want a third incompatible Skype.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  They did leverage the Skype brand, at the cost of the Lync brand people in business all knew. They made that one change because people in business all associated the brand "Lync" with a low quality product. At the time of the pandemics, they decided to push the Teams brand instead of Skype because people in business all associated the brand "Skype" with a very low quality product.
- count 3y ago
  Possibly getting that talent to work on what became teams?
- flakeoil 3y ago
  Skype is mainly a consumer product and that's where they have their users.

outside1234 3y ago

Teams stole a lot of ideas and talent from Skype. It is not like they just invented Teams from a cleanroom. They used the human and code assets from Skype to make Teams.

master-lincoln 3y ago
Can you steal ideas? I think you mean copy. When stealing something from someone, the other person does not possess it anymore. Also in this context it makes even less sense as Microsoft bought Skype before Teams existed. I think you can't you steal something you own.
nullindividual 3y ago
The evolution of Teams Office Communicator -> Lync -> SfB -> Teams. Skype consumer had no impact on Teams sans the name and original codec which is no longer in use by Teams. I don't know why you would make up a 'fact'.

tw04 3y ago

>Then the pandemic happened and they allowed (or couldn't stop) Zoom from becoming synonymous with video calls during that period. Skype could (should?) have been the verb that everyone used. This isn't surprising at all, Skype for Business was a joke - the verb used at the time was Webex. What is shocking is how horribly Cisco bungled the entire thing. They went from market dominance (61% market share) to almost an afterthought in a matter of a year. https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/collaboration/webex-calling/wainhouse-cloud-uc-calling.pdf https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/solutions/collateral/colla...

mschuster91 3y ago
> This isn't surprising at all, Skype for Business was a joke - the verb used at the time was Webex. What is shocking is how horribly Cisco bungled the entire thing. They went from market dominance (61% market share) to almost an afterthought in a matter of a year. Webex was just as bad and unreliable as Skype for Business, the only reason why that shit even existed was that it integrated nicely with your existing Cisco telephony and conference room hardware. First, Zoom came in with an extremely easy to use solution right when Covid hit, and Teams sealed the fate of both by being cheap to effectively free and being even lower in barrier to entry - including the effort for compliance stuff like SSO and auditing which eventually grew more important for companies as the "it's a pandemic" excuse ceased to be viable. Personally, I do not think that there is a chance that MS Teams can be displaced any more in the enterprise space, simply because of the compliance overhead that everyone else has to do while it's considered "done" for companies that already use Office 365. And now that MS is offering VoIP integration, companies are also ditching their expensive and, let's be honest given their reputation for security issues, insecure Cisco stuff.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  Without a Cisco device WebEx was such a nightmare. I don't think video worked in any call I ever joined that didn't use Cisco equipment. Somehow computer audio was usually unavailable for reasons I don't understand. This was before bluetooth audio was omnipresent due to AirPods and I had to use the shit phone speakers and microphone. For me it always was the worst experience of any conferencing tool by a wide margin.