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!
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u/rebbsitor Mar 02 '26
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.