Hacker News Reader

Comment by DharmaPolice | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

>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/colla...

Webex is definitely a lesson in never accepting that you've won no matter what your marketshare in a space is, especially if the "switch cost" is essentially nil

I dunno. Half the interviews I had in last 6 months were Webex invites. The other half MS Teams and one radom Google Meet in there. (in Germany, so probably Webex is more sticky with these dinosaur companies over here)

I'm German (firstborn American, really, but all my relatives are over there) and as a tech guy it's always surprised and dismayed me, especially over the last 20-odd years, just how significantly laggardly the German world is technologically. I don't know if it's a conflict of values, Helmut Kohl being a complete Luddite idiot (and the bad legacy thereof), or some other combination of things, but Germany sure seems to have some very smart people who are also very lacking the benefits of tech that are routinely enjoyed in the States. (They would surely argue that they are, in turn, also enjoying the lack of drawbacks of some of those things, such as increased general population fitness/health, etc.)

Had I been born there instead of here, I often wonder how things would have turned out as I got starved of exposure to computers, modems, programming languages, Internet, cell service, etc... I mean, I know there are communities of people there who are into all of those things, but it certainly seems to be massively de-emphasized

Did I mention Helmut Kohl made some of the worst decisions possible in this area? It cannot be underemphasized how badly he mis-stepped on this stuff.

Could you please explain what he did exactly?

Well, it's not just his decision, but it did end up having a broader cooling effect in general. This is a decent explanation of the current Internet situation in Germany and the historical decisions that were contributions to it:

https://www.settle-in-berlin.com/why-is-internet-so-bad-in-g...

It's hilarious that Angela Merkel said "the Internet is new territory" in 2013, nearly 20 years after it first burst onto the dialup scene.

The switch cost wasn't exactly nil. As far as I'm aware most cisco stuff came with a commitment to a per-device, per-user or per-seat license and support for a period of time where the cost of those is reduced more the longer you commit when you negotiate the contract. Webex was bad enough that some enterprises were switching mid-cycle to another product and just letting the license/support for Webex go unused. Which is impressive considering how cheap corporate/enterprise procurement/finance/IT are. Granted, a lot of teams or departments were initially signing up for other services without knowledge of their corporate/enterprise IT departments which really made the quality contrast between them and Webex undeniable but that happens with a lot of stuff that gets squashed even if teams like it better and it makes them more productive.

my assumption was Cisco no longer cared about that business line. Is that wrong?

Based on their features and bug fixes in their releases and how it got progressively worse in terms of reliability/performance for the backend: I think it was clear they made a decision to stop investing/prioritizing it and only tried to fix things when they realized they had their market share absolutely annihilated in no time flat. I can't imagine it was a "surprise" to anyone in management there but I'm not sure they expected resting on their laurels to result in major blowback as fast as it did.

Very much not the case. They just got lazy because the competition was so bad. Pandemic hit and they got destroyed with the increased traffic causing businesses to rapidly seek alternatives.

IIRC Cisco owned most of the underlying infrastructure and just couldnt scale fast enough.

That seems kind of hard to imagine that Cisco couldn't scale fast enough. But if it is, there is a total corporate failure on their part.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

Co-Pilot is coming to Office, among other applications.

But it costs extra, no? It's not included by default with Teams, Excel, PowePoint and the others, right?

Yes, that's true. $30/user/month w/o discount.

> Pretty clear why Teams wins anyway... Assuming you want SSO in your corporation.

Zoom supports SSO. I use it every day.

To clarify, I meant the pricing for Zoom is based on the tier with SSO in the comparison.

Appreciate this isn’t the way I worded it, and the sentence should have ended with a “:” rather than a “.”

Ah, that makes more sense

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.

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.

Possibly getting that talent to work on what became teams?

Skype is mainly a consumer product and that's where they have their users.

That's only because they never invested in the corporate side of it.

Both Google Meet and Zoom have both consumer and business users. Skype could have done the same if Microsoft didn't let it rot.

I'm not even sure when or why people (including myself) stopped using Skype... I used it constantly a decade or so a go both for business and personal. It's like Microsoft just forgot about it while other competitors entered the market and ate away at their market share.

A strong Skype brand and decent Skype for business product would have made so much sense. Regardless of quality, wherever I've worked Teams always felt like a soulless forced corporate product. The brand is almost universally hated, and for what? They had a great brand with Skype it was just neglected.

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.

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.

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.

It was also named Lync in the mean-time, no?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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'.

Teams uses Skype under the hood.

Does it? Isn't it just a WebRTC thing?

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com