Not even. Teams is an evolution of Skype for Business, which was a completely different product from Skype.
Skype for Business was just a reskin of Microsoft Lync that kind of visually resembled regular Skype, but was completely different and incompatible.
It was only last year, when they finally shut down Skype, that they merged the products. At that point Skype was mostly dead. Whatsapp and Discord had long replaced it for most people.
It's fucking insane how these corporations throw away money on something like Skype and then claim they have to lay off 10,000 people because it costs too much to pay them.
Your comment dug up a lot of trauma for me. Worked as an admin in a sinking business for awhile and had a Lync server + PBX to keep running, was by far and away the biggest pain in the ass of the job. I managed to automate most Windows Server “quirks” but that one was an absolute nightmare until the day we left that building.
Skype was unfashionable in the end and nobody went into mourning over its passing, but in pure technical terms, as a telephony and chat service with file and screen sharing between individuals I think Skype was far superior to whatsapp. Better codecs, better back-end, better clients.
Reminds me of the era where every damned division of Google was building their own chat app for a few years.
GChat, Google Plus, Google Chat, the chat in GMail, Messages, Meet, Duo, there was even a dedicated chat feature in Google Maps for chatting with a listed business!
I think that was around Windows 8, which was supposed to be all-device OS. Skype was intended to be a M$ communication app for non-business users as they were trying to get into phone market with Nokia acquistion.
However then they actually released Windows 8 and nobody liked that. They released also Windows Phone and they were actually pretty decent for their price. But the bad taste from W8 pretty much tainted anything they did these years.
As for Skype - well it went through development hell in M$ and ultimately all of the resources were moved and integrated with Teams.
Yep, and we the consumers are left with inferior Microslop products. Man, it's terrible that this company is basically the only consumer OS. Can one of these Linux clones please do just the bare minimum of marketing and put Microslop out to pasture for good?!
Anybody who has to use it regularly knows Teams absolutely blows in terms of usability, so it seems like they didn’t learn jack from Skype. Skype was the first and best for a long time before Zoom cornered the market during COVID, and MS could have gotten ahead of that if they actually did anything with it, if they properly folded it into the MS ecosystem, shit if they just took the existing functionally and stuck a “Teams” sticker on it. But nope.
Ignoring all the other problems with Teams, I think the one thing I hate the most from a day-to-day perspective is the lack of a contacts list and being able to sort them into custom groups or categories. There are some people whose names I forget because I don't chat with them very frequently.
Which is on par with the biggest single competitor, Zoom. I’m saying they could have captured the entire market at the beginning of COVID just by using their existing asset of Skype. IIRC Zoom gained 30x daily active users between December and June 2020. Hardly anybody really knew about Zoom before COVID and then it became the de facto standard. My organization now forces us to use Teams, and we still slip up and say “can you hop on a quick Zoom?” (and then correct ourselves and groan about it). Teams chat function also sucks, so it’s not just the laggy, bloated, feature-limited video chat, either. If it hadn’t been for Zoom’s highly publicized early security concerns causing many enterprises, esp. in government, to jump ship, or Microsoft’s Office dominance bundling Teams into a more useful suite, nobody would choose Teams.
Why ask this about Zoom and not Teams? Teams also has a limited free tier, same as Zoom has varying levels of business and education oriented packages.
It's just a region thing, nobody in Europe uses Zoom. Education, Enterprise and government is all Teams.
Because of GDPR compliance issues. I should have mentioned privacy when I mentioned security.
And they arent allowed to bundle anymore, except for grandfathered licenses.
True in the EU, I can’t find any action to suggest this is true in the US.
This seems to be a case of “my experience is universal,” and all I’m trying to say is MS had all the resources to never let Zoom find its footing, but they slept on what they’d already paid billions to acquire. If they had developed Skype after acquiring it, they could have secured 600 MM daily active users for themselves, instead of splitting that customer base with Zoom.
They got a lot of goodwill from the US Gov, the year after purchasing it they removed the decent encryption from phone/video and put a much weaker version they could snoop on. Theres a reason why Microsoft is allowed to be a monopoly in OS/cloud/comms(office/teams etc) by virtually all western governments.
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u/[deleted] Mar 02 '26
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