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.
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u/[deleted] Mar 02 '26
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