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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

How did Zoom defeat Skype in terms of userbase?

Skype was absolutely awful for many years. I'm trying to remember all the things that were bad, but I remember that they reinvented the app twice, so that everyone could only talk to people on the version of the app they were on.

They left Linux users in limbo, while Zoom worked for everyone.

They couldn't handle more than a couple of people in a call.

They also had Lync which was rebranded as Skype, so you also had other bad software masquerading as Skype which wouldn't have helped their image.

You couldn't share a meeting URL and have the call in a browser for the longest time.

They only started to try again after Zoom picked up being the default word for video calls.

By Skype getting gradually worse with every release. It is mindboggling how it is WORSE than the Skype I used 15 years ago in every way I can think of.

It’s kind of incredible, Skype had a 10 year head-start and still lost.

But really, much of Teams was built upon Skype, and that is the dominant market player by a long shot.

Teams is dominant?

Do you have any source on that?

This graph did the rounds on Friday, comparing it to Slack on daily users:

https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1558054445237149697?...

The graph doesn't include Zoom or Google Meet, so is not a perfect representation.

Why do you think that Teams was built on Skype? Technologically, even the stack is completely different.

Until fairly recently, if you opened the PulseAudio volume control app while in a Teams call, the volume slider for the call would be labelled as Skype. That's a name that the sound-producing software hands to PulseAudio, and is reasonable evidence that Microsoft basically ripped the back-end out of Skype and shoved it into Teams and forgot to change what it thought its name was.

At some point a few years back, before Zoom was really big, Skype changed their entire UI and UX into Snapchat or Instagram... it went from an app for communicating to an app for looking at people's updates... or something? I have no idea what its objective became. I doubt Skype knew either.

That's when I switched away.

Skype was originally built on P2P, so it couldn't work in a group chat and bad for mobile phones. That's the reason Skype fell behind other chat apps.

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